Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Custom Skins => Topic started by: oboe on March 14, 2005, 10:04:30 PM
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Reference "American Warplanes of WWII", David Donald
From pp 181:
"The standard USAAF colors were olive drab on top and neutral grey underneath for land-based aircraft. Because of the urgency in camoflaging a large number of aircraft much unsatisfactory paint was used pending the formulation of dark olive drab with better weathering characteristics. Aircraft painted in the early part of World War II eventually weathered considerably to a variety of colours depending on local conditions: when freshly applied olive drab was darker than the greens, but the OD faded noticeably faster."
Just thought that was kind of interesting, and is evidence to support a variety of weathered shades of greens/drabs in our early US skins...
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One thing for certain is that in skinning, whatever color looks best is the right color :) . US planes are in much better condition than LW or IJN/IJAAF planes in the fact that a variety of sources and planes referring to the exact colors still exist.
When I was skinning LW planes, many sources always contradicted each other and it was very hard to really verify which colors were 'historic' and which were 'popular misconceptions'. In the end, I had to use mixed references from mixed sources so the plane just looks 'pretty', but still feels much 'historic' :) So technically, all of the skinning work for LW planes I did were, in the end, just 'speculations', and probably 'semi-historic'.
I'm not sure how camo paint was applied to each planes, but I'm guessing it didn't come from a universal supplier in exact same colors everytime. At least, for the Soviets, who also saw large changes in paint schemes during the war years, I know that in many cases only the 'guidelines' were received from High Command and each of the squadrons just mixed up paint colors according to it. So the planes of the same squadrons would sometimes have different shades of green or grey, and some might be using the old scheme while others were using the new scheme.. and some in winter camou and some in summer.. etc etc..
Just make it look pretty, and the odds are, what feels 'right' to most people is probably really 'right' :)
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Agreed.
Actually, its kind of nice for us. What could be more visually boring than a bunch of US planes all exactly the same shade of green? We're lucky we get to play around with different shades green/drab and methods of weathering and can still produce acceptable, believeable work.
Same goes for VVS, IJ, and LW planes.