Hello friends,
With my '44 San Francisco model primed and ready for paint, I now am having some doubts about the 5-L light grey. There aren't any color photos of SF I can find, but contrast between the 5-L light grey and 5-O ocean grey is not too bright, as seen in the picture below:
I looked up present day pictures of USS Slater and USS North Carolina, both wearing a MS32 camouflage scheme with basically with the same colors as San Francisco in MS33 outfit, only with the addition of dark blue in the former:
The point is that the 5-L in this picture look almost white to me. I get the same experience when looking at North Carolina's pictures. I intend to use Sovereign Hobbies Colourcoats 5-L and 5-O, of which I thought this was spot on (I read this somewhere). But as it comes out of the bottle the 5-L can sure be seen as light grey, but compared to the pictures above it still looks too dark to me. On a small scale model I'm afraid the model will turn out too dark.
This picture is not perfect, but these are 5-O and 5-L underneath each other on a black background color:
I'm not sure it is very visible in my photo, but actually the same goes for the 5-O. Again, when compared to Slater and North Carolina, it strikes me that this color is too dark as well. Of course I can tune both paints down by mixing some white, but now I'm not sure whether to do this or not.
Any advice or tips for me?
- Bas