[WWI] "Scale Effect"

[Aidrian Bridgeman-Sutton]

> Who cares?  I mean really there are so many variables that planes coming out
> of the same factory 1 day apart have differences in their colors.

Actually a lot of us do care...that's why the subject comes up from
time to time.  For many of us the model is just the groudwork for a
three dimensional painting of the original and colour matters.

There are some professional loonies who insist they can't finish their
model because they don't have a FS595 match for Russian CDL and swear
that what is in 595 must cover any and all possible ranges of colours
- often these sorts are full of knowledge but short on understanding.
They are also frequently the types of people who seem to reduce the
art of colouring to the unthinking use of formulas for mixing the
exact shade they want from Tamigunzcoat paints  - we don't seem to
have many of those around here thank heavens

Hopefully we don't take it to absurd levels like trying to mimic the
fact that the guy stirring the paint had a hangover on the day one
particular plane came out of the works, but we try to paint under the
same sort of light that the model will be displayed under (no
cool-white fluorescents thank you) and try to get the individual
colours and more importantly *their relationships to each other*
reasonably close. No we can't control metamerism which is a product of
differing pigments and paint chemistry, but we can control a lot of
other things

Would you buy a landscape painting where the artist had used poster
colour bright green for the ground and cobalt blue for the sky? Or
spend weeks building a Camel and paint it any old green with any old
buff colour underneath? I don't expect Victorian watercolours  to look
the same under CFLs as they did under gas lamps, but neither do I
choose to display them like that.

The idea is to come up with something that looks credible rather than
an exact match for a specific type of paint on a specific day in 1917.

Aidrian