Krusty said:If you mean that you look at the light/dark color on the decal sheet and then on the picture and see it has a different light/dark camo, that's a minor detail, IMO. A lot of decal sheets use generic upper surfaces, but they get the details right most of the time. The details would include over-sized white wingtips (which are non-standard and would appear to be part of a unique paint scheme). I'd very much like to see the skin with the wingtips.
It's been my experience that decal sheets are usually the least accurate source you can use, unless they're of the quality aftermarket variety, and sometimes even they get it wrong. Thus, I don't trust decal sheets on unusual features unless they provide a photo of the real plane to back it up. I can show you many examples where there are photos of the real plane that flatly contradict decal sheets purporting to be the same plane at the same time. And in a case where, as here, they didn't bother to put an upper surface scheme on that matches a readily available photo, it really calls into question the existence of any wingtip color on the upper surface, especially since that was not a standard thing on the Russian Front.
Kit-supplied decal sheets and paint schemes are the worst. Most of them are deliberately half-ass efforts are realism. This is because the kit makers know that dweeb modelers aren't anal enough to know or care about the inaccuracies, and that real modelers are just buying the basic kit and will use aftermarket parts and decals regardless of what's in the kit. So they just slap something together, not worrying too much about the sizes, shapes, colors. Like everybody else, they usually have to invent the upper surface schemes due to a derth of photos showing that on real planes, and sometimes they exercise too much artistic license there.
In this particular case, I had 2 sources that disagreed. I chose to follow the one I consider more reliable. It could well be the decal sheet is right. However, I'd like a photo showing that.
EDIT: Oops I re-read what you typed. Do you have any examples of this other reference you're using? I'm curious now.
Claes Sundin and Christer Bergstrom put out books of profiles. This plane was in their
More Luftwaffe Fighter Aircraft in Profile. These guys are very anal about thorough research and little details, like any good modellers or skinners. They work almost exclusively from photos and try to minimize the amount of speculation and guessing they do. That's why they do just profiles instead of 3- or 5-views of the planes--there are just so few planes out there that have photos of their top surfaces that it's pretty much total guesswork to do the top surface.
In their profile of this plane, you can of course see the wingtip. There is no light color on top, just the camo color. I take this to mean that Sunin and Bergstrom could find no evidence of any yellow or white upper wingtip color. If they had, they'd have put it in their profile. Since they didn't, I consider that good enough reason not to put it on my skin.
Of course, us skinners HAVE to do the upper surfaces, but we run into the same problem of a lack of documentation. This is only really a problem for German planes, because pretty much everybody else used standard camo patterns, or standard solid colors, or bare metal. With the Germans, however, there wasn't even standardization on the colors, especially later in the war, let alone the patterns they were applied in. In most of the few photos available showing several German planes of the same type, in the same unit, all parked in a row, taken from somewhere above like the control tower, none of the planes have the same upper surface pattern.
Thus, 99% of the time, the upper surface pattern of a model or skin of a particular German plane is pure speculation. It's an artistic interpretation, a "typical" scheme based on what the modeller or skinner knows from photos of OTHER German planes of that type and vintage, but there's usually there's zero proof that this PARTICULAR plane had that pattern, and a very low likelihood that it actually did. And when the modeller or skinner follows a paint scheme shown on a decal sheet, he's just copying the artistic impression of the guy who drew up the sheet, who had no better idea of how that particular plane really looked than anybody else.
I think the color underneath the rings is too light. Too clean. In the photo it looks like there's some light shades of darker color on the sides underneath the rings, almost.
It's hard to make a call on that. It could be due to a subtle shadow due to a slight deformation of the plane's skin, or the difference between original paint and later repainting, or some faint paint mottling done before the "ringworm" set in, or dirt and/or soot, or the result of deterioration of the original photo, or even some artifact of scanning a whatever-th generation reprint of the photo. If you look close, there's a similar sort of darker area in the light wing color just above the right arm of the cross and below that prop blade, again of unknown parentage.
In such cases, I make a judgment call as to what it is based on my overall take of the whole plane. In this case, I decided it was either a problem with the photo or something transient like dust that had settled on the plane after landing, but which would have blown off again on its next flight. So I left it off this skin.
