I was inspired by Pat Hawkey’s F 5 in this months issue to finally start to plan my own F 5 build that has been sitting on the back burner forever. When doing some research on the color often reffered to as “purple haze” I came across a huge difference in shades on some F 5 color pictures. In some cases the color is called cerulian blue and also synthetic haze. It seems there was no standard F 5 color for these planes to me. Which one to pick from now?
Soulcrusher
I thought they were painted PRU Blue, a British color, and that another name for it was Synthetic Haze. I have some Humbrol tins of the PRU Blue.
I wonder how much photo technology of the day effects the blue in the pictures compared with what they would have looked like in person.
Soulcrusher…
In truth, almost any blue-ish purple hazy type color you can spray onto a P-38 will be almost correct…ir more importantly, won’t be incorrect.
The Haze Paint was a real pain - in real life. Extremely delicate, faded extremely quickly, was easily damaged…and a real pain to apply as well.
Have a look at Dana Bell’s article on Haze Paint…pretty interesting:
http://www.34thprs.org/html/aircraft/haze.html
It’s an interesting article that might help in some small way.
Enjoy!
Lee,
Many thanks for posting this link - I had been search (vainly) for some fairly in-depth info on thsi subject! It’s wonderful to have such a wide knowledge base assembled as we do here on FSM!
Brian [C):-)]
Thanks leemitcheltree!
That article explains why there are such huge color differences. I guess the darker colors are examples of poorly applied synthetic haze according to the article. The lighter blue colors are the second attempt much lighter. You can see how much this paint even faded on the one photo where the paint was retouched and is way darker than the other areas. This is F 5 color question is getting even more interesting due to all of the variations and color fading. It leaves alot of artistic leeway to have some fun with it. Mabye a plane with the poorly applied dark color or a light blue version with faded upper portion and patches of darker colors where repairs were made. Much more interesting than most American WWII aircraft. The only thing that make most American WWII aircraft interesting the cool squadron markings or the nose art. Lets face it green over gray or bare metal are not that exciting. They do not ever compare to all of the different elaborate German WWII markings that were used.
I found a website that gives FS numbers and CMYK values for two blues used to make up synthetic haze paint. From all the discussion I realize it is just a starting point, but here it is: