What are the exact Tamiya paint colours required?

Rangatron

Hello

I need to know what Tamiya colours (XF Acrylic) are required to paint Trumpeters 1/350 HMS Hoodlike in this video and in this photo.

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1STzDV6bkmo

 

http://static.imodeler.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Hood-08.jpg

 

I have looked it up and checked it out on the HMS Hood website (colour schemes etc) but I am unsure what Tamiya paints are needed. Please help

 

Thank you so very much

 

The answer is in the response to your prior post.   

http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/7/t/172184.aspx

Option II;  June 1936 to June 1939

 

• Tamiya XF-80 - Royal Light Grey (acrylic). Many people use this colour out of convenience. Its similar but not as close as the paints listed above (its a tad too dark and not blue enough).

The original post just wasn't answerable. I just took a look at the Tamiya website. From what I can tell, Tamiya acrylic comes in 64 colors. There's just no way that every color ever applied to a piece of military machinery can be matched accurately to one of those 64.

I don't want to be discourteous, or unhelpful, toward any other modeler. But in the past few years a small number of enthusiasts seem to have convinced a lot of other people that there's only one answer to any color question in scale modeling. That just plain isn't true.

We've taken this up on several threads in this Forum. I sounded off about it in this post: http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/7/p/99738/987616.aspx#987616 .

Also - the greys in those two links in the original post aren't identical. The pictures probably were taken in different lighting situations, and with different cameras.

I won't repeat all the arguments I offered in 2008, but I will venture an observation. The day that one modeler can TELL another modeler that a particular paint color is an "exact match" for a particular prototype color, and that to use any other color is WRONG, will be the day I get out of the hobby.

Scale modeling is a fascinating mixture of research, manual skill, and aesthetic judgment. And the last I heard, it's supposed to be fun.

Rangatron, my advice is: through photos, documents, paint chips, or whatever, get an idea in your head of what colors that ship really was. Then do your best to match what's in your head.

 

Tamiya colors run to blue.

I will commit a heresy here and say that this business of "conversion" charts is at best an approximation.

In the world of steel navies, I really only ever rely on the WEM system, and that is only based in the understanding that They were stewed up from real paint chips by John Snyder.

They have a certain muted balance of warm and cool, what the color expert in my life would term sophisticated.

Somewhat similar, I have always been pretty satisfied with Humbrol as far as RAF.

My advice is to go to WEM and get  what you need. I look at a 1/350 model as a major time investment. Usually a year. 

 

 

I have one more suggestion that doesn't directly answer your question.  (Sorry - )

When you are looking for matching colors, I suggest that you look at the color reference you have available, and ask yourself how you see the relation of one color to another.  Do you see two colors that are only a slight shade apart, or would you characterize them as "one light and one medium", or "one light and the other quite a bit darker"?  Do you see a significant greenish shade in one of the colors?  A blueish shade?

Your completed model is going on your shelf, not mine or Prof Tilley's.  If you describe your requirements in your own mind before you start, and then build and paint toward your set of requirements, you will be happy with your build.

Good luck,
Rick

Well put, Surface_Line.

 

I'm sure GMorrison's evaluation of White Ensign paints is quite valid. The gents who mixed up those colors were real enthusiasts who knew exactly what they were doing.

The problem is that the original, British White Ensign Models company went out of business a few years ago. An American company took over the photo-etched fittings and resin ship kits, but not the paints.

The White Ensign Colourcoats paint line was taken over by another British firm, Sovereign Hobbies. It offers a huge range (over 400 colors, though I have no idea how many are actually in stock at any given moment), including sets designed for particular ships. The Sovereign website advertises an "HMS Hood as sunk" set as "Coming Soon." Here's a link: https://www.sovereignhobbies.co.uk/collections/colourcoats-sea/products/hms-hood?variant=12904983108 .

You could buy the individual colors as well: https://www.sovereignhobbies.co.uk/collections/colourcoats-sea/british . Unfortunately there are two problems. One - Sovereign Hobbies doesn't do mail order business outside the United Kingdom. A note about halfway down the page I just linked says, "Please Note - We are unable to post Colourcoats Paint outside of Mainland UK. Please see our "Where to buy" for international orders." I looked pretty hard for that "Where to buy" page, but couldn't find it. Maybe some other Forum member knows: does some American retailer stock Sovereign Colourcoats paint? (I'm assuming - perhaps incorrectly - that Rangatoon lives in the U.S. If I'm mistaken, I apologize.)

The other problem is that these paints are enamels. That means they thin with turpentine or mineral spirits, rather than water - and they stink, to the point of giving some people (like me) headaches. Enamel paint is wonderful stuff, but it handles differently than acrylics and, generally speaking, takes longer to dry.

Another approach would be to order a set of Snyder and Short color chips: http://shipcamouflage.com/royal_navy1.htm . With those chips in hand, you can mix up matching colors in whatever paint brand you like. Snyder and Short do send stuff to American addresses.

Another, considerably less precise (but more practical) approach would be to print out the color samples on the Sovereign website on your printer, and match your colors to those. The purists will tell you that isn't a good way to do it, and they're right: all sorts of things happen to colors between the time the artist paints them and the time they come out of your printer. 

But my contention is that those samples will give you a pretty close approximation of what you want - and, as I said back in 2008, that's actually the best you can hope for.

Good luck.

All points/problems that I myself have just ran into trying to source colors for my Graf Spee build. Colorcoats has them all and even has a Graf Spee 'set' but they are difficult to find. I have resorted to sourcing the colors in other brands and have found them all but one in the AK Interactive line and the one that I have been unable to find turns out to be a very close match to panzer gray which I have a ton of.

Here are the two American distributors for the Colorcoats lines:

H&B Hobbies

and 

Warship Hobbies

I can remember the days when the hobby shops just had the one rack of little square Testors bottles-40 or 50 of them, 49¢ each in various colors.  There were a couple of specialty colors like insignia orange and zinc chromate, and even Olive Drab.  That last one not being labeld as to whether it was meant to be Army Air Corps OD, WWII armor OD, unitform & webbing OD, or even post war hues of those.

Scale Modeler and, later, Military Modeler gave us our fist glimpses at people who cared enough to note the differences.  The veyr beginnings of the Osprey books were starting to appear in hobby shops, too, so we'd have a reference.

A well-rounded hobby shop would have a rack of Floquil paints, a very-fine ground pigment paint in a xylene carrier which evaporated very quickly and was aimed, very sepecifically, at the model railroad crowd.

An extremely diverse shop might also have the 16 or 24 colors of Practra flying kit "dope' paint, which was way too "hot" for styrene, but had its usese.

What a miracle it was when those glorious tins of Humbrol paint showed up, that let us paint armor kits practically "by the numbers."

We did not have the resources to know RN had a "Western Approached" paint scheme or what colours it was in; we barely knew that the USN had used camoflage in a war that haf completed only a scant thrity years previously.  Battleships were grey, all over, decks, hulls, everything but gun barrels and those were black.

Scale effect would not become something we considered for most of another twenty years.  Scale effect occurs in ship subjects becaue, for a 1/350 kit, as 12" away you are viewing the kit at a scale 350 foot distance.  It will have an appearance of being much paler, lighter in hue, than if a person were standing upon the ship's decks.

Bravo to those modelers who strive for complete accuracy. In my humble opinion, If it looks right then that's good enough. I like to have fun with my builds and stressing over whether or not this is the exact right shade of gray used in the ETO in July of '44.... I will do what I can to use the correct colors but I'm not going to put a build on hold for 3-4 weeks waiting on a tin of paint to come in. I freely admit that my builds are not on par with some of you out there. Some you guys do some truly outstanding work. But I build for relaxation. Not always easy with todays complex kits and tiny parts. We wont even get into PE. Lol. In short ( to late ,right ) if you want to build "museum quality" , knock yourself out, but don't forget to have fun building. Lastly , lets not forget about our beginners. Let them know that's its OK to use what they have on hand. that they don't have to use every last bit of PE. Just go ahead and build out of box. I admit that I to get caught up in the " accuracy " thing from time to time. Usually when I'm building a subject to give to a veteran. Just remember to have fun along the way. Happy building everyone !!