equivalent WEM 37 USN "Slate Gray"

Tracy,

Just checked your site. I've bookmarked your site and its a great resource. (Could never figure out why Combined Fleet - with the help of old pal Jon Parshall - got such a splendid site and the USN didn't. And the USN, unless I missed something, won the war.) Actually the information provided could be very valuable for trying to reverse engineering those colors. I knew that Snyder/Short were hooked up with WEM paints so I guess that makes my strategy of using their colors as samples more or less sound. The color samples would be nice too, but nothing beats applying paint to white styrene to anticipate what the color will actually be.

Which means that using WEM paints would be the best solution if one cares about accuracy for USN WWII ships. But what if enamels are not your cup of tea. There's LifeColor. Or you could make your own. That  would be a long row to hoe but sounds like great fun. As I've nagged before grays will drive you bats and just to make things sweet the documents provided show that the USN was thinking of their ships as being gray. (That's very clear when checking WEM Navy and Deck Blue.) The Munsell system is incredibly clever and it remains popular with many paint junkies. I was lucky enough to find a student edition (with maybe half the paint chips included) on Amazon last year for a song - and it was of tremendous value in trying to track down the perfect early war Zero color. Anyone interested in the system can download either the original (about 1914) by Munsell from Project Guttenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26054 or a shorter summary by a student named Cleland: http://munsell.com/about-munsell-color/published-work/munsell-notation-cleland/. When you start getting the hang of it the idea of making a blue-gray out of purple makes sense.(If you make your living getting colors to match and want a proper Munsell standards book, get ready to pay $1000.)

In a perfect world what we'd need to know is what the Munsell designation for the "purple/blue" was under the old system. (I doubt the system is so much different today as more complex.) We'd also need to know what the white was. A “white” could be essentially a mixing paint that would lighten the color only at pretty high density. (In other words it's close to “transparent” on the scale used by many companies.) Zinc White is a very good example of this. White can also be a very powerful color: Titanium White is the best example of this – in the bottle it looks the same as Zinc, but in practice it is much closer to opaque. The difference is night/day (no pun intended.)

I'm going to be looking at a much earlier USN gray, but I think I'll start with a chromatic black with a bit of blue. There are a lot of ways to get there but I'd start with a recipe passed on by the makers of Golden Acrylics who make some of the best paints on the planet. (They also have a lot of information on their wonderful site. The general one dealing with color mixing is http://www.goldenpaints.com/artist/mixguide.php .)

This is one recipe for chromatic black that I'd guess wasn't so far off from the brew used by the USN. Note that the “deepest blue” possible is followed by some yellow.

Mixing to achieve black and gray using Phthalo Blue G/S, Quinacridone Magenta and Hansa Yellow Medium

Step 1: Mix 1 part of Phthalo Blue (Green Shade) with 2 parts Quinacridone Magenta. The mixture will be correct when you perceive it to be the deepest blue without being described as purple. This is an approximate primary blue.

Step 2: Mix 2 parts primary blue with 1 part Hansa Yellow Medium.

Step 3: Tint a small portion of the resulting color with Titanium White.

Color mixing is an exercise in frustration unless you liked to finger paint. (Extremely important to follow the light to dark and mix well sequence.) It's also pointless for some colors – but not many. It's a real exercise in humility to compare several companies versions of the basic Luftwaffe colors (RLM) Of course many of those are grays.

Eric

I think that would be the point. Leave aside the question of rust - a time and place affair - fading as I understand it was constant - it was salt water (and a lot of sun in the PTO) which ship makers have been fighting since there have been ships. But fading would have been irregular. A real challenge for modelers. (Personally I found the Flower Corvette on FSM's cover an issue back to be a real jem. Wish it was mine.)

Eric

It all depended. Painting was done by the crew, by repair ships, or by shipyard personnel. With as many ships as the Navy had, they wouldn't wait for every ship to make it to overhaul before re-painting, but they also wouldn't order a ship to immediately repaint if it was going to go into overhaul in a couple of weeks.

Paint shouldn't vary much when freshly applied, but it did fade and chalk, so you have some wiggle room. Of course, if you *want* to be accurate (nothing against the "close enough crowd, just illustrating a point) you should pay attention to how it weathers (it didn't weather darker!). 

No quibbles Ed. As noted I was using WEM's enamel paints as the standard to compare two of LifeColor's to. Maybe someone here knows how the USN painted their ships. Tanks were painted at the factory and in the US Army that was pretty much it. Aircraft pretty similar. But planes and tanks were nickle/dime items compared to ships. Obviously they received a paint job at the shipyard to prevent corrosion. But when orders came down the line to change a camo scheme, who did the work? Was it the crew perhaps with assistance of men at the forward bases like Espiritu Santo or was this done when ships got a proper make-over at Pearl Harbor or, better yet, the US? I think this would be pretty important to know - I'd guess strongly that the farther down the food chain the work was done the greater the variation would be on the color. Throw in varying degrees of exposure to salt water and I'd guess the modeler has quite a bit of room for creative license.

Eric

EBergerud

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I'd say that the quotes from Steel Navy via Shipmodeler given by Tracy earlier are pretty good summaries of Life Color 5-N and 20B - but I'm basing my opinions on comparison with WEM, not Snyder and Short. They are certainly close to the samples from Steel Navy http://www.steelnavy.com/usnchips.htm . These are difficult colors no doubt and both could be thought of as variations on gray.

snip

A little history.  The Snyder & Short paint chips came out in 1998.   A buddy picked  up the then-new product at the 1998 IPMS Nationals in Santa Clara, CA.    I first met John Snyder in 1999 at the IPMS Nats in Orlando.  John is a paint conservationist my training and used his knowledge in the development of the paint chips then in the creation of the Colourcoat line of paints.   He had to marry into the WEM family to pull that off ;->

The link to SteelNavy which you cite predates the S&S chips probably by a good two to three years.   Things on the internet have a life of their own, and are seldom updated in response to new information.    I know both Jon Warneke and Jeff Herne.  Good guys,  good researchers.   But their methodology was to go into a paint store with the Munsell designation of the paints and a copy of the 1929 Munsell color guide and with their Mk1 eyeball make a decision as to what commercial color mix was closest.   Were they looking at the chips under incandescent,  fluorescent,  or natural light?  

I don't know what Lifecolor chose to use as their standard.   I do know that when Testor's ModelMaster announced their acrylic marine paints (now discontinued) they indicated that they were matched to the S&S Chips.

With a knowledge of the history and people involved you can often judge the accuracy of a product or claim.  

EBergerud

but I'm basing my opinions on comparison with WEM, not Snyder and Short.

*snip*

It would be very interesting to know what pigments were normally employed by the USN.

*snip*

As I recall the Navy used white and purple to make haze gray, 5-N and 20-B. I believe it.  All we'd have to know is their exact definition of "purple" and we'd be in business.

First off, John Snyder of White Ensign is the "Snyder" from Snyder and Short, so the WEM Paints and the S&S paint chips are essentially the same colors.

I've posted a bunch of original WWII Navy documentation to my site here; in short, the hues were purple blue based on the 1928 Munsell book of color. .note that there was a revision after that so a modern Munsell book would not give the same colors. I do have a table on that page with the Munsell values for each paint. 5-D was different, but the other paints were essentially all based on the same white base and purple/blue tinting paste, mixed in different proportions. You can see the proportions for Haze and Ocean Gray here and Navy Blue here.

I have WEM Navy Blue (5-N); Haze Gray (5H as I recall) and Deck Blue (20B). I have LifeColor 5-N and 20B. The WEMs are in California and the LC are in Minnesota at the moment so I can't give you a direct shoot-out. Should add, that I spent a lot of time studying the WEM paints - I don't like to use enamels (like to look at them) so I used WEM as samples for my own brew. I distinctly remember thinking that both 5-N and 20-B were more gray and less blue than I expected. I'd say that the quotes from Steel Navy via Shipmodeler given by Tracy earlier are pretty good summaries of Life Color 5-N and 20B - but I'm basing my opinions on comparison with WEM, not Snyder and Short. They are certainly close to the samples from Steel Navy http://www.steelnavy.com/usnchips.htm . These are difficult colors no doubt and both could be thought of as variations on gray. It would be very interesting to know what pigments were normally employed by the USN. The SteelNavy chips don't have anything on them that I'd call "neutral gray." In theory black isn't a color but in reality it is. If you mixed carbon black with titanium white using artist grade oils or acrylics - model paints might be fine, but they unfortunately give no information about pigments or the relative opacity of the color - you'd come up with a neutral gray. But as I understand it, at the industrial level carbon can have a very slight green or blue hue. There are about fifty recipes for chromatic black and they all have some properly odd colors - magenta, intense greens, green/blues etc. As I recall the Navy used white and purple to make haze gray, 5-N and 20-B. I believe it.  All we'd have to know is their exact definition of "purple" and we'd be in business. I know from experience that the smallest difference in a color that complex can have a surprising impact: I wonder if any two ships in the USN were exact matches.Throw in the whole issue of scale and weathering and your results will very definitely vary. But if WEM's colors mentioned above are accurate, Lifecolor's equivalents are ballpark. Be nice if LC had more competition in acrylics, but they don't as of now. (I really think Gunze and Tamiya's "Navy Blue" are really aircraft colors, although Tamiya's spray Haze Gray looks the part. I bet you could do interesting things with Tamiya's German Gray too - that's got a bit of blue in it.)

Also got WEM's Slate: I really can't decide whether the hue is slightly green or blue. I'm going to have to make two versions of chromatic black and mess around until I come up with a solid match. Grays will drive you bats. Sobering to recall that experts in optics still argue about primes.

Eric

The Lifecolor 5-D is a dark gray, as is the Humbrol matt-77 which Humbrol lists as a Navy Blue matt and it's anything but blue.

Scott

Ummm no, it should not be blue. 5-D was a dark, neutral gray. The more I hear about their paints the less I like.

Harry @ BattleFleet is good people though.

I received my paint order from Battlefleet on Weds, only took 4 days and it was packed well . I was surprised to find the Lifecolor 5-D looks very very close to Humbrols Navy Blue matt-77. I just sprayed the the decks with the Teak, straight from the bottle into the airbrush and it was a piece of cake, no mixing...zip! It went on well and clean up was a snap. So far I'm sold on both the Battlefleet store and Lifecolors and would recommend them. 

Scott 

There's no international standard for paint names... "Navy Blue" as a color goes back a while too.

That said, in USN service the Navy Blue and Deck Blue were supposed to be tinted to match.. they were different formulas due to the different areas they were to be painted on (deck paints were more wear resistant), but should have been fairly close when fresh.

I don't use enamels except for washes and some drybrushing. I've bought the major USN WEM colors - they do make very good samples. Mixing can be tricky with some of these colors: white does not necessarily simply tint a color - it can change hue itself. I think I'd add a lighter shade of bluish grey. And if WEM has it right you really are dealing with blue/gray colors with both Navy Blue and Deck Blue. (Actually, they're pretty close, at least when not adjusted for scale.) Gunze's "Navy Blue" is also very dark. Wonder if they're not referring to an aircraft color. Can't comment on Tamiya's spray Navy Blue - the color looks too bright on the can but the only way to tell is to make a proper sample. 

Keep us informed. Water based acrylics have a learning curve, but some of them have excellent colors, are good with a paintbrush and you could drink them without any harm. LifeColor does seem to be aggressively covering the military color range and it will be good to know how they perform.

Eric

Thanks for the tip guys!   I just place an order a moment ago through Battlefleet for the Life color paints 5-L and 5-D, to finish off the Banner Arizona.   Yesterday I sprayed Humbrol's #77 Navy Blue on her but it just looks too dark,even for the Measure-1 paint scheme, of course I could have added a little white but than I thought I would be digging myself into a hole here.  Than doing some on-line researching I learn of the life color Naval paints and thought I'd give them a try.

No, I said that *some* of the *WW II* paints have been found to be inaccurate:

http://www.shipmodels.info/mws_forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=77101#p416659

Tracy,

I have LifeColor's version of and Naval Deck Blue. You say that LlifeColors WWI USN colors are inaccurate? I hope these don't belong on the list. But if they are, what would you suggest doing to compensate the poor owner.

Eric

LifeColor appears to paint well, but some of their USN WWII colors are inaccurate.

I ordered a WEM tin from battlefleet. It won't slow me down too much and if I've got a nice sample I'll know whether we're dealing with a blue tint, a green tint or a darker shade of neutral gray. I lovely Combrig Olympia on Shipmodeler used something that looks a whole lot like RLM02 - a dark/greenish/muddy grey and claims that was the USN "war" color of the time. Another example looks like a dark RLM75. On a big ship like Oregon, the difference will be pretty considerable.

The folk at battlefieet say they're beginning to replace WEM with LifeColor because of supply problems. I know this has precedent because I waited a long time for WEM Navy/Deck Blue about a year back. It does look like LifeColor is very serious marketing a specific world war era colors for each country - like Aeromaster used to. My only experience has been positive but I know the brand has its detractors. It could be that the success of Tamiya has modelers treating "acrylics" all the same whether they should or not. Good luck to them anyway.

Eric

And here's another US source.  They are generally pretty quick on shipping.

http://store.midtennhobbies.com/pre-1945-us-navy-c246.aspx

They seem to have 4 tins in stock.

Thanks for the tip: never heard of battlefleet - hope they can a tin out within a reasonable time. I'll essentially use it as a paint chip: except for washes and drybrushing I haven't used an enamel paint in a very long time. (I'm pretty sure I can make a good grey if I know whether it has a blue or a green tint to it.) I did get the Life Color Navy Blue and Deck Blue - the stuff is water based but I'm used to that. If they can show the same fidelity to colors as WEM has, acrylic fans will have something to be happy about.

Eric

There are vendors in the US who stock and ship WEM paints... no need to play around with false positives.

http://battlefleetmodels.com/id81.html

http://www.shipcamouflage.com/order_form.htm

Thanks for the tip: I've never seen that chart. Humbrol makes two shades of "slate." The light one is close to RLM 75 - gray/violet. The dark one is closer to RLM 02 - a kind of dark, muddy green-gray. I do have one picture of WEM slate and it looks a bit blue, but a photo and a monitor can really be deceptive when you're dealing with grays which are maybe the toughest colors to photograph.

Eric

Here's another useful one if you've got a photo where the color looks just right to you--just paste in the url and it will find the closest match in its database:

http://scalemodeldb.com/paint

could try www.paint4models.com   I use it quite a bit.