by Eric Bergerud » Thu Jun 21, 2012 12:44 pm
You could be 100% right - or the extent that it's possible to match one color to another. Can drive one bats. But not even yours truly has every paint, although I'm alarmingly close. The thing you'd have to ask is whether the MM color is a neutral gray. As noted, color identification with "eyeball" is very risky, but I'm virtually certain that Slate is has a very slight green tone, although I wouldn't drop dead if someone came up with a document showing it had blue. When the USN did start using neutral gray it was specified as such. This was also the time (around the turn of the century) when there was much interest in finding the best color to confuse the long range fire becoming possible with quickly improving guns and optics - some of which included what you might call analog computers. This interest was across board among navies. For instance, the Germans were moving to RAL 7000 and 7001 - both having some blue. Late in WWI and then again before WWII when navies were worrying about submarines and aircraft respectively a new round of experimentation took place. Out of this comes dazzle and a couple of pink Brit DDs in the Med. That's why we ended up with blue destroyers in the South Pacific. (Actually they're blue-gray and gray-blue, often made out of purple and white. I didn't believe it either until I started studying mixing with primes. As purple is not a prime it would be really nice to know what it's make-up was.) It's not easy to see the fine points with my poor excuse for a color sample. However, the rectangle immediately right of the Slate is Vallejo Model Color Dark Blue Gray. Beneath it is Vallejo's Model Color RLM 02 - it's a thinner mix but the color is actually fairly close. The rectangle to the far right is straight Vallejo Black Gray which is a neutral color I'm almost sure. In clear lighting you can see it doesn't quite match Slate. Put a little reflective green (worked better than Vallejo Russian green) and it's very close. Course by the time you adjust for scale and weather, it probably doesn't make much difference. For all I know you could paint a model a very dark neutral gray and give it a green filter and that would work.
Eric
You could be 100% right - or the extent that it's possible to match one color to another. Can drive one bats. But not even yours truly has every paint, although I'm alarmingly close. The thing you'd have to ask is whether the MM color is a neutral gray. As noted, color identification with "eyeball" is very risky, but I'm virtually certain that Slate is has a very slight green tone, although I wouldn't drop dead if someone came up with a document showing it had blue. When the USN did start using neutral gray it was specified as such. This was also the time (around the turn of the century) when there was much interest in finding the best color to confuse the long range fire becoming possible with quickly improving guns and optics - some of which included what you might call analog computers. This interest was across board among navies. For instance, the Germans were moving to RAL 7000 and 7001 - both having some blue. Late in WWI and then again before WWII when navies were worrying about submarines and aircraft respectively a new round of experimentation took place. Out of this comes dazzle and a couple of pink Brit DDs in the Med. That's why we ended up with blue destroyers in the South Pacific. (Actually they're blue-gray and gray-blue, often made out of purple and white. I didn't believe it either until I started studying mixing with primes. As purple is not a prime it would be really nice to know what it's make-up was.) It's not easy to see the fine points with my poor excuse for a color sample. However, the rectangle immediately right of the Slate is Vallejo Model Color Dark Blue Gray. Beneath it is Vallejo's Model Color RLM 02 - it's a thinner mix but the color is actually fairly close. The rectangle to the far right is straight Vallejo Black Gray which is a neutral color I'm almost sure. In clear lighting you can see it doesn't quite match Slate. Put a little reflective green (worked better than Vallejo Russian green) and it's very close. Course by the time you adjust for scale and weather, it probably doesn't make much difference. For all I know you could paint a model a very dark neutral gray and give it a green filter and that would work.
Eric