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Chock · 30 October 2009, 06:37 PM

If they were mixing a colour that some pilot took a shine to, in order to paint his aircraft, there's a good chance that to get a plum colour they'd probably simply have slung some blue in with some red and maybe a touch of black too, since one could hardly nip to a DIY store in WW1 and choose a colour of choice. Moreover, on the Albatros DIII, the weight was starting to become an issue too when they put that sesquiplane wing on, so any paint added was not going to help that issue, which means if the paint job didn't quite turn out right, they'd probably live with it rather than slap more paint on and increase the weight even more.

Thus, about the best we can do is guess, however we don't have to guess blindly. I've attached a scan of the Reichs Luft Ministry colour chips at the bottom of this post, and although these date from the mid 1930s, they do give one an idea of the kind of colours the Germans had floating around airfields to enable them to paint aircraft, and it is unlikely that things would have drastically changed from a couple of decades previously. Note that I always keep that RLM chip sheet away from UV light, so it is not especially faded as far as I am aware, and I compared it with a Pantone colour reference book to get the reference for Photoshop to give you all the other colour splits, so it should be a pretty good shot.

The other problem is however, that unless you have a perfectly calibrated monitor, or a Pantone book (unless you happen to work in the print or advertising industry), you might not be seeing the original RLM chip sheet I scanned as it is, so it might be useful to know the following: I have Photoshop on the Adobe (RGB) 1998 colour profile (fairly standard for web stuff and likely to be the standard profile of your monitor), as opposed to sRGBEIC 61966-2.1, which is more common in the print industry for RGB transfers of files to printers in Europe, so an accurate CMYK conversion can be made. And you can match those profile settings in Acrobat if you don't have Photoshop. So with that in mind, even if you monitor is not accurately calibrated, given that the closest colour match to a plum colour is RLM 26, that equates roughly with Pantone 7526C, therefore, here are all the typical colour values for a conversion of Pantone 7526C into other colour repro methods:

HSB: 18,72,49

LAB: 36,35,37

RGB: 125,61,34

CMYK: 29,83,100,28

Hexidecimal reference for HTML: 7D3D22

Focoltone: 3344

TOYO: 0838pc (not an especially good match by the way)

Trumatch: 7-a7 (also not a very close match)

The RLM chips:

You ought to also bear in mind that if you are making a model of something with that colour, which will tend to be fairly dark, you'll probably want to lighten it up a tad for the scale effect of colour, since if you look at a 1/48 scale model from a metre away, you should paint it to emulate the effect of that, which equates to looking at the real thing from 48 metres away.

Happy painting.

Al

30 October 2009, 06:37 PM	#9 (permalink)
Chock Scout Pilot Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: The grim north of England Posts: 405	If they were mixing a colour that some pilot took a shine to, in order to paint his aircraft, there's a good chance that to get a plum colour they'd probably simply have slung some blue in with some red and maybe a touch of black too, since one could hardly nip to a DIY store in WW1 and choose a colour of choice. Moreover, on the Albatros DIII, the weight was starting to become an issue too when they put that sesquiplane wing on, so any paint added was not going to help that issue, which means if the paint job didn't quite turn out right, they'd probably live with it rather than slap more paint on and increase the weight even more. Thus, about the best we can do is guess, however we don't have to guess blindly. I've attached a scan of the Reichs Luft Ministry colour chips at the bottom of this post, and although these date from the mid 1930s, they do give one an idea of the kind of colours the Germans had floating around airfields to enable them to paint aircraft, and it is unlikely that things would have drastically changed from a couple of decades previously. Note that I always keep that RLM chip sheet away from UV light, so it is not especially faded as far as I am aware, and I compared it with a Pantone colour reference book to get the reference for Photoshop to give you all the other colour splits, so it should be a pretty good shot. The other problem is however, that unless you have a perfectly calibrated monitor, or a Pantone book (unless you happen to work in the print or advertising industry), you might not be seeing the original RLM chip sheet I scanned as it is, so it might be useful to know the following: I have Photoshop on the Adobe (RGB) 1998 colour profile (fairly standard for web stuff and likely to be the standard profile of your monitor), as opposed to sRGBEIC 61966-2.1, which is more common in the print industry for RGB transfers of files to printers in Europe, so an accurate CMYK conversion can be made. And you can match those profile settings in Acrobat if you don't have Photoshop. So with that in mind, even if you monitor is not accurately calibrated, given that the closest colour match to a plum colour is RLM 26, that equates roughly with Pantone 7526C, therefore, here are all the typical colour values for a conversion of Pantone 7526C into other colour repro methods: HSB: 18,72,49 LAB: 36,35,37 RGB: 125,61,34 CMYK: 29,83,100,28 Hexidecimal reference for HTML: 7D3D22 Focoltone: 3344 TOYO: 0838pc (not an especially good match by the way) Trumatch: 7-a7 (also not a very close match) The RLM chips: You ought to also bear in mind that if you are making a model of something with that colour, which will tend to be fairly dark, you'll probably want to lighten it up a tad for the scale effect of colour, since if you look at a 1/48 scale model from a metre away, you should paint it to emulate the effect of that, which equates to looking at the real thing from 48 metres away. Happy painting. Al __________________ Wiseman: When you removed the book from the cradle, did you speak the words? Ash: Yeah, basically. Wiseman: Did you speak the exact words? Ash: Look, maybe I didn't say every single little tiny syllable, no. But basically I said them, yeah. Last edited by Chock; 30 October 2009 at 06:47 PM.