A regular plea for help is when a modeller asks what are the "right" colours to paint a scale model are. The obvious answer is "the same as the full-size vessel". But, Artists, well those who want to make an honest living from their talents, have long known that for realism an objects perceived colour depends upon the light conditions and distance from the observer.
Take the extreme case of a dark night and everything looks, well dark. You would be hard pressed to identify the true colour of any object under these conditions. Even viewing in daylight has its problems as the natural light can vary from blinding bright sunlight to dull overcast.
Our eyes can compensate for this variation in light without much conscious effort on your part, thanks to evolution and the desire not to become somethings next meal. But, if you look at a photograph of the same thing under different lighting conditions the differences can be quite striking.
One way of getting the perfect colour match is to go along to the full-size vessel armed with lots of paint. Slap the paints onto the vessel until you get a perfect match and use that on your model. Alas, this will only be a match at that time, come back a year later and you can bet the paint has faded or maybe the vessel has been repainted. Perhaps a more serious problem with this method is the reaction of the crew or owner when you start slapping paint on their vessel...?
Even with this perfect colour match there is the question of the distance at which you view the model. If it's a model designed to impress when viewed extremely close up then a "perfect" colour match could be justified. But a sailing model is a little different. Take a model built at 1/100 scale being viewed when sailing at a distance of say 3 metres, which is the equivalent of viewing the real thing at 300 metres. The light from the model has only to travel through 3 m of air to reach your eyes but through 300 m of air from the real vessel.
Your reaction might be that air is transparent so it doesn't matter. In fact air is full of stuff that interferes with the transmission of light, dust, pollen (ask any hay fever sufferers) and moisture. Absorption in air may be a slight effect maybe but its cumulative. I'm writing this in summer and for once it's not raining, and the trees are covered in green leaves. The trees in our garden have strong, maybe even vivid green leaves. Looking further away at trees in the surrounding fields and they still green but not vivid. As for those on the horizon, maybe a mile away, they are still green but much more muted, more a shade of grey. Walk around any art gallery and you will see that this is how landscape artists suggest distance on a flat canvas.
So where does this leave our troubled modeller who wants his model not to look blatantly wrong but accepts that "perfection" under all conditions is impossible. I'd suggest that you do not worry about getting a perfect match and settle for getting the nearest good commercial paint to meet your needs. By using such a paint, then any damage that might occur (perhaps it's more realistic to say will occur?) can be touched up without requiring a complete repaint. Of course you have to expect criticism from the self-righteous experts for your chromatic crimes...
Glynn Guest
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Topic: Pragmatic Painting (Read 722 times)