Acrylic Substitute for WEM "Slate"

[Eric Bergerud]

According to the gurus behind WEM paints the color employed for wartime by the USN during the Spanish American War (and I think until 1917 - but I might have that one wrong) is a color they call Slate. It is a very dark gray with just a bit of what I'm pretty sure is green. I don't have the luxury of a well ventilated shop so using enamel paints is out by marital decree. (I agree on this one.) I did, however, buy a tin of WEM Slate to use as a sample. After a whole lot of mixing with primes and poking around my far too large paint collection (one bottle is so cheap: funny how that mounts up over some time) I think I came up with a pretty decent acrylic substitute. The brew is 95% Vallejo Model Color "Black Gray." On its own this is very close to slate. (In the right lower corner is a rectangle of straight Vallejo Black Gray with "Bl Gr" underneath.) However, just a tad of Model Color "Reflective Green" gave me a color that is extremely close to the WEM. Below are samples done on white styrene. WEM Slate is surrounded by X's (wasn't smart enough to leave a space to write in the name.) On the second sample, the smaller rectangle that sits just to the left of the Slate is the Black Gray slightly tinted with reflective green. ("Ref Gr" is scribbled underneath.) Scanners and monitors are imperfect, but the match was very good examined under sunlight.
Eric

[NukeMM]

This looks like Model Master Acrylic "Engine Gray", to me, sir.

Just my two cents.

[Eric Bergerud]

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