The Little World

And that word is generally : ” inaccurate “…

In a world awash in internet images, the scale modeller could be forgiven for thinking that they’ll never have a problem with colour again. All they’ll have to do is google up an image of the prototype they’re building and copy the picture.

This is as accurate a procedure as going down the paint racks of the local hobby shop and picking out jars at random with your eyes closed. Or, for that matter, trusting the paint makers to do an exact shade or hue to match the kit you’ve bought. Let me turn on the light for you:

Paint makers make paint. They make it the colour they want to make it, and your part of the deal is to pay for it, spread it on, and shut up. If they say it’s RLM 67 and it looks like baby vomit to you, it’s the fault of your eyes.

So back to the picture on the net. It is likely to be accurate about 1% of the time and inaccurate for the other 99%. Reasons?

a. The picture that got fed into the net may have been inaccurate at the time. If it was an original colour picture of the MARY ROSE taken on cameras of the Tudor period you have to remember what they made poor old King Henry VIII look like.

Wartime colour films were dodgy – both Allied and Axis. Time has robbed the originals of much of their accuracy – newspaper and magazine images of the time have deteriorated as well. It may have been bad then and got worse. Putting it up on Pinterest don’t make it better.

b. Your computer/tablet/phone monitor’s colour could be way out of whack.

I used to sell computer calibration devices for the photo trade. A good one could return a monitor to the same inaccurate colour point regularly, and the photographer could take it from there. It might be off, but at least it was off consistently.

Uncalibrated devices that download, upload, and display mean that the whole thing is a ball of multicoloured yard and you’re the kitten.

c. The paint at the time could have been anything.

Literally. RLM, BS, FS, or whatever were paint specifications that companies and departments might have read on a government order. What wartime factories actually had may have been pots of anything.

d. The people painting the equipment were cold, hungry, and bored.

So did they make masterpieces of precision and artistic blending? Were they perfectionists? They were the heroic paint crew, not the heroic aircrew. Go look at spray painters in auto body shops right now and make your own assessment…