WW2 Model Airplane Kits

Federal standard colours and their equivalents in hobby paints.

While taking a break from figuring out how to document my build on the 1/48 scale Italeri P40M-N I’ll be building next, I realized I had two 1/72 scale kits of the North American Harvard to build. One by Airfix and the other by Academy. I liked one of the colour schemes from the Academy kit and adapted it to the Airfix one. Now since the scheme  is not world war two related I decided not to document the build but rather to talk about colour matching hobby paints to Federal Standard Colours.

There are two federal Standards 595a and 595b. Now the Academy kit has colour call outs in FS colours so I started with the FS numbers and tried to match them to my existing paint stocks. I didn’t have any matches in my acrylic paints so discarded the idea of airbrushing the camouflage, and went to my Humbrol enamel stocks where I found matches for three of the colours according to available data. And decided at that point I would hand paint the colour scheme by brush.

Now painting your model by hand with a paint brush is something I have done for years and wont go into the finer points of it here but look for a how to soon. After matching to the three I could find, I took the colour I had that most matched the colour sample I had for the colour I was missing. And my paint scheme was sorted and ready to apply.

Now that may sound simple enough but I had to find the information to do it first and here in lies my tale. Knowing what FS colours you need are half the battle, having found those it was to Google and searching for the answers. Computers are wonderful things, but the first thing you learn is you have to know how to ask the questions to get the answer you want! So away I went and I’ll list for you the websites I found to help me, so that you can use them to and hopefully make it easier on you.

Here they are in no particular order:-

http://www.ipmsstockholm.org/colorcharts/stuff_eng_colorcharts_fs.htm which contains the federal standards and the equivalent hobby paint matches.

http://www.cybermodeler.com/color/fs595b_acr1.shtmlAlso cybermodeler has colour chips and equivalent matches.

http://www.colorserver.net/

This website has colour chips for federal numbers forums/discussion groups

http://www.estore.fed-std-595.com/main.sc

And from this site you can purchase colour fans of the federal standard 595

http://www.milspray.com/technical-data/fedcolors.html

This website will give you virtual colour chips although it wont let you print them out.

Now Milspray was important because it gave me an opportunity to see what colour I was trying to match, and subsequently I managed to find a colour that closely resembled the one I was looking for and I proceeded to Paint the assembled model. So I ended up finding paint equivalents for the following FS colours

FS 36440      Humbrol 129   Gull Gray

FS30400       Humbrol 93     Sand

FS34097       Humbrol 105   Dark Green

FS34227       Humbrol 120   Medium Green

One thing you learn is the the colour name and the Federal Standard for the same colour do not necessarily make it easy to find the match in the hobby paints range, hence why I rely on some one more skilled than myself to match the paints for me. I have found the IPMS Stockholm website to be a true font of knowledge I can’t recommend them highly enough!

Okay that’s the journey so far! Happy modeling till next time!

NzFlyBoy

July 5th, 2009 | Tags: Academy, Acrylic Paints, Airfix, Camouflage, Colour Scheme, Colour Schemes, Colours, Enamel, Equivalents, Federal Standard, Google, Half The Battle, Ipmsstockholm, North American Harvard, Paint Brush, Paint Scheme, Paints, Stocks, Wonderful Things, World War Two | Category: 1-48th scale Ww2 Airplanes, Airfix Model Airplane Kits, Airplane Model Building, WW2 Model Airplane Projects, WW2 Model Airplanes to Build | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL