Wolff's Plum Albatros

[firblatz]

Kurt Wolff's Albatros DIII 2099/16 was painted "plum" aft of the cockpit. Could someone please tell me what color that is - ie a Fed Std chip or something? Thakx,

[JFM]

Hello,

There are questions regarding 2099/16 being Wolff's machine. There is the photo of it crashed on the RR tracks and captions describe it as happening when Wolff was wounded 11 July 1917, but Bodenschatz wrote about how Wolff landed at Marckebeke after being wounded; Wolff wrote the same in a letter to his fiancée.

Wolff's machine in March was described as plum purple but by the end of April he was flying the newer 632/17 Alb D.III, which had its entire fuselage washed in a dark color, believed to be red. Perhaps 2099/16 was his earlier plum purple machine and pranged by someone else? I do not know. I have not researched this personally so can offer little more.

As far as the shade of purple Wolff used, I'd be interested in its exact hue and how this had been determined.

[Dan_San_Abbott]

Hi Jim:
Plum purple is defined in the Methuen Handbook Of Colour as 15F5, which is a very dark purple. i also checked plum purple in the BRITISH COLOUR COUNCIL DICTIONARY OF COLOURS FOR INTERIOR DECORATION which has colour chips. Like the Methuen Handbook, all the colour are identifed by a name and a number, which is C.C.304, and is a match to the Methuen color chip.
Blue skies,
Dan-San

[JFM]

Thanks for that, Dan-San. I wish I had a Methuen book. Perhaps if I skip a mortgage payment I can buy one!

[Russell Smith]

I have a feeling that whoever first used the term "plum purple" was not using a Methuen book to match an exact color. They were probably just speaking in general terms.

[GMU]

Originally Posted by Russell Smith

I have a feeling that whoever first used the term "plum purple" was not using a Methuen book to match an exact color. They were probably just speaking in general terms.

Yeah, like a ripe plum, I guess.

It is easy to have the color image in our minds, but determining the exact color range would be difficult

[REID_CBH_REG]

It's funny I came across this I was about to ask the same question....I was windering did the aircraft also carry a personal marking or was it just painted??? While I'm here can anybody tell m anything about Allmenroeders Green Albatros I'm having trouble finding any good reference material on it.

[StephenLawson]

You may want to talk to Greg VanWyngarden on this subject.

[Chock]

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

[RAGIII]

Originally Posted by firblatz

Kurt Wolff's Albatros DIII 2099/16 was painted "plum" aft of the cockpit. Could someone please tell me what color that is - ie a Fed Std chip or something? Thakx,

This is the first time I have heard "AFT" fuselage mentioned reference this aircraft? GvW has indicated in both of his JG1 books, and I believe the Osprey Albatros Aces book, that the entire fuselage was "Plum Purple". It is also stated that in certain lighting conditions the aircraft looked to be red!
I agree with stephen in that I hope GvW chimes in!
RAGIII