SPA Modeler

Painting masterclass as always John!

Wow! That looks awesome!

Thanks everyone! Comments are always appreciated!

Floki wrote:That's a great variety of colors. I'm surprised to see the RLM75&76 both on the underside but still don't know much about late war camo

And I ain't even done with the bottom yet! One more color yet to come and that is the late war variation of RLM76. It's a yellow-green that's similar to RAF Sky and sometimes referred to by modelers as RLM84, although that designation was never used by the Luftwaffe. Late war Luftwaffe schemes were very... interesting to say the least.

Back to the model... typically I paint in the rough order of real-life paint application. Camo first, markings afterwards. However, in this case, I decided to deviate and paint the black and white JG26 tailband first. There are some advantages to doing this that I wanted to take advantage of, primarily being the reduced number of paint coats. Minimizing paint coats is always important on my riveted builds as the small holes tend to get filled with paint. The white is sprayed on first.


The demarcation between the black and the white is masked off with Tamiya yellow tape and then the black is sprayed on.


The whole band is then masked off with Tamiya yellow tape and we won't get to see the results until after the camo painting is done. But doing this way has saved me at least 2-3 layers of paint under the tail bands.


I am going to do some hairspray chipping along the wing roots so in preparation for that, the wing roots are sprayed using Tamiya AS-12 silver spray paint decanted into my airbrush and thinned slightly with Mr Leveling Thinner.

Very nice, that banding is going to look great when the masking is revealed - I do my sky bands on RAF aircraft the same way, as well as the D-Day stripes.

Thanks Stuart!

Ok... a little bit of explanation on how I am approaching the camo painting of Brown 4. First off, a disclaimer... I am not claiming any type of authenticity or accuracy with my color choices. Most of it is based on published references but there are also some personal preferences and interpretation involved. I am approaching this as an interesting and fun exercise to juggle the different references and come up with a version of Brown 4 that makes sense to me.

There are a lot of different interpretations and color profiles of Brown 4 and considering that all of these are based on a few black and white images of the aircraft, they are all arguably valid. I consider Jerry Crandall and the folks at JaPo to be two of the more inforrmed resources when it comes to Doras and so I tend to give their interpretations more weight than others. The difficulty comes when these two resources come into conflict with one another, which is the case with Brown 4.

Below is JaPo's profile of Brown 4. The late war variation of RLM 76 as the primary fuselage color is shared with Crandall but JaPo describes the upper colors as primarily RLM 81 Brown with maybe a touch of RLM 82 Bright Green on the canopy frames and rear fuselage.


The profile of Brown 4 from Crandall's Dora Volume 1 is a bit different. Crandall describes the upper camo colors as a combination of green colors (RLM 82 Bright Green and RLM 83 Dark Green) with the upper wings being possibly RLM 74 Dark Grey/RLM Grey Violet.


If you have both of these excellent references, you'll notice that there seem to some recurring themes that manifest themselves in the camo interpretations. For example, JaPo holds strongly to the opinion that the forward wing bottoms of Mimetall (500xxx) Doras were painted in the darker of the two upper wing colors, most likely RLM 81 Brown. In contrast, Crandall usually asserts that this forward wing bottom color was RLM 75 Grey Violet. Nearly impossible to say who is right or wrong but I present the interesting case one particular Mimetall D-9... Black 8 (500581).

JaPo's profile of Black 8 is very similar to its Brown 4. Late war RLM 76 as the primary fuselage color with the top fuselage color being a singular application of RLM81 Brown. Upper wings are described as a high contrast pairing of standard RLM 76 Light Blue and RLM 81 Brown, with the brown wrapping to the forward wing bottom.


And consistent with its own description of Brown 4, Crandall's profile of Black 8 specifies a combination of green (RLM 82/RLM 83) on the top with area forward of the windscreen being RLM 81 Brown.


Unlike JaPo, which seems to only have access to black and white photos of Black 8, Crandall's book also has COLOR photos of Black 8 to support its camo description. In the photos, it is clear to me that a bright green was used on the upper fuselage and that the upper wings were a combination of grey colors, presumably RLM 74/RLM 75.


In addition to confirming the use of bright green as a fuselage camo color, this throws a little bit of water on the idea of RLM81 being applied on the forward wing bottoms and has lead to my decision to use RLM 75 instead. But I do think there is merit in JaPo's contention that an upper wing color was continued to the forward wing bottom. But instead of the darker color like RLM 81, it will be the lighter RLM 75 and I'll base the upper wing camo pattern on another Mimetall Dora that JaPo describes.


Further thinking about JaPo's assertion that Mimetall Doras were painted with a singular application of RLM 81 Brown on the upper fuselage... I think it could've been possible with a field application of green(s) showing up on some/many/all Doras like Black 8. Blue 12 (500570) is one of the more heavily photographed Doras. And based on color photos, JaPo has grudgingly acknowledged the use of green on the upper fuselage along with its favored RLM 81. I think this is a good blueprint for what Brown 4 might have looked like.


Below is a photo of Blue 12 prior to being scrapped. I don't know if you see the same thing that I do but it seems possible that there is a darker application (RLM 81) underneath the green. RLM 82 Bright Green field applied over a factory application of RLM 81 seems to be a good compromise/explanation between the different Crandall/JaPo interpretations and that is how I am planning to approach the upper fuselage colors.

That's a lot of info to take in. I applaud your research. Both make good cases I would side more on the Jerry Crandall books he seemed to have more access to material to back up his interpretations.

Yes, lots of info presented and probably lots of info that I missed. But we do our research and we make our choices. I really wanted to try the high contrast RLM 76 and RLM 81 scheme for the wings that JaPo presented on some of the Mimetall Doras and depicted in some photos...


But based on the pic of Brown 4, it seemed like a lower contrast RLM 83/RLM 75 or RLM 74/RLM 75 was more likely.


Based on the color photo of Black 8, which is also a Mimetall Dora (500581 vs 500647), I chose the latter.

The high contrast wings do look really cool. Will save that photo for future reference

Time to establish the pre-shade layer. First, I go over the panel lines in black.



Using a trimmed piece of a kitchen scrubbing pad as a paint mask, I spray more black to establish a random mottle pattern.


This is applied to the entire exterior of the model. What it does is provide some tonal depth/variation to the camo colors which are to come. I developed this technique as an alternative to black-basing, which is similar but is essentially an inverse of what I do. It uses less paint than black-basing as it forms contrast between the dark painted mottle and underlying plastic as opposed to two paint layers.

That scratch pad technique might be easily modified for monotone overall color schemes…