I am currently building Major T. McGuire’s P-38H, named Pudgy.
A P-38H in +/- may 1944, pacific theatre.
According to the instructions this aircraft had a grey/olive drab camo scheme.
But in some refences the color brown is named/shown as the top color.
Does anyone have any ideas/clues what color it should be?
The paint should be olive drab over neutral gray. However, the shade of olive drab would vary from plane to plane because of the lack of standard colors. Same thing with the interior of aircraft. If you feel that Olive Drab is too green, then just add some flat brown to turn it browner.
Also when the bird faded it could have taken on a more brownish hue. I second Ryan’s opinion
I’m not sure exactly when Pudgy lost her OD (mid-1944 I think), but here’s a shot of her in natural metal. I’ve got the exact dates somewhere at home… JH
OD is one of those elusive colors that can photograph as green or brown, depending on lighting, film used & camera settings. Add to that the variables of 50 year old pics & the differences in paint mixes & weathering effects. But in any case the correct color would be OD over NG. How you represent the OD is up to the modeler.
Regards, Rick
The December 1990 issue of FSM has color information and profiles for all of McGuire’s “Pudgy” airplanes. I think there were five.
Some were O.D. but the last were bare metal.
I’ll see if I can did that issue out and post some more information soon. It’s in my den…I just saw it last week. [:)]
By the way, check out these photos of some famous P-38s and pilots, taken during the war. Many of them are in color, including one of Pudgy V:
http://www.web-birds.com/5th/475/475th.htm
Regards,
Thanks for all the feedback!
It seems OD is one of those more elusive colors (like interior green, zinc chromate and RLM 2)
I will just have to use my own jugement on what color to use.
I hve got another question on the color scheme on American aircraft. (olive drab over grey)
Were the colors airbrushed freehand? Was there a feathered egde between the two colors?
Or did they use masking to get a hard edge? (like the British did?)
I believe it was sprayed freehand, however the edge isnt that feathered because of the scale of the bird. Anyone please correct me if I’m wrong I’m looking at restored birds
Heres a pic of what a restoration team did with your camo scheme on a P-38
hope this helps a little,
Jerry
Although oftentimes restorations are not accurate, I believe your conclusions are basically correct. After leafing though P-38 Lightning at War, I didn’t see any photos in which the color demarcation lines were obviously masked, although the feathering on the 8th AF was very tight with the Pacific birds not nearly so much. I think that for the 8th AF Ligfhtnings, masking with the edges lifted to take off the sharpness would be appropriate. For the Pacific Lightnings, the feathering usually seemed pronounced enough to be visible, even in scale, although it would probably fairly tight feathering on a model.
summary:
The edge was feathered, but due to scale this would almost not be noticable.
Freehand AB on the model would give a to large feathering, masking with silly putty/raised masking tape could be an option to get a “soft” edge.