In Living Colour: Painting what where.

DB says, somewhat verbosely after a bottle of cheap champagne:

I’ve been fortunate to spend some time in the digital darkroom with DLA Turner over the past year and this exposure (haha) has heightened my awareness (not expertise, alas!) of colour, and this can be useful for a modeler. Sometimes colours can be obvious: ...Toll Rail Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi locos use a very pale vomit-coloured yellow, which contrasts sharply with the richer yellows used in our other schemes. Now I know that the Toll yellow is green tinted whereas the Bumblebee yellow is red tinted and more heavily saturated. Why is that useful? Because if I want to mix some paint, I know what colour to add.
My new DX will be a Kiwirail one – so that’s red, yellow and gray. Pretty straightforward you’d think: run out to the shop and buy some Humbrol Trainer Yellow, some Friday Night Lipstick Red and Bland Tax Auditor Gray… But before you buy, take a look at pages 36-37 of the latest (March 09) Railfan mag if you have one to hand.

Look closely at the reds of the KiwiRail locos in this spread. On the left page, compare the two shots from Mike Graham to that of Dave Gallie. The top two are similar, but the bottom red is far richer, darker, deeper, ‘redder’ perhaps. Compare the two bottom pics (5293 at Normanby vs 5454 at Kaiwarra). 5454 almost looks orange in comparison. But which one is the real KiwiRail Persimmon?
Now look at Ken Devlin’s pic of the DFT top right. That entire pic has a greeny/yellow cast to it – look at the gray compared to the other shots. Note how the gray in the bottom right pic is much lighter than the picture bottom left. The two pics from Graham McClare on the right also have a little green tinge in the yellow loco fronts.

Six pictures in one issue of a pretty high quality magazine, and I have maybe three reds, three grays and two yellows to pick from. Now I could paint up my DX in any of those shades and it would look fine, because even if the colours are ‘wrong’ they’ll grow on me and will be my perception of reality. Until that loco gets parked next to someone else’s model and their perception of the KiwiRail scheme.

I was watching those colours carefully a few weeks ago in 1:1 scale so I’m aiming for a red and a yellow like 5293 bottom-left. I reckon the gray in the two Graham McClare pics is right. Yes, that is my final answer. But I could be wrong. Is this really important in NZ120? I dunno, but I do know, (now) that most of the NZ120 models I’ve made before this year have quite incorrect shades of red and blue. They look completely wrong. And I’ve only just noticed.

Long after locos and stations vanish – and even 'now', for those of us without daily access to our modeling subjects – pictures are what we base our models on, so it would be nice if they represented reality not only in sizes and shapes but also in their colour faithfulness. When you’re painting models, see if you can get hold of multiple pictures from multiple sources. If you look carefully, you’ll start to see which photographers, publishers and magazines take time over colour correction and those that don’t.

The key, is to be aware.

Would you prefer blue or bleu?

As an aside... why so many shades of reality?

1. Paint fades over time in the sun – look at DG2111 in it's later stages . Most of our remaining fruit salads have held up well, but reds often darken in time, losing some of their yellow to appear bluer. Then again, sometimes they go pink. DG 772 at Ferrymead was painted last year based on an original shade found on the loco under many layers of paint (I will personally attest). BUT that wasn’t fresh paint. It was exposed to the elements for years, then subjected to a further 50 years of decomposition and sunlight that would filter through subsequent repaints.

2. Different shades can be used. I’m sure this was more prevalent when a thousand country stations were painted with locally mixed paints, but even today, I wonder if DX 5172 has a lighter skippy yellow than the others. DGs carried several shades of red before fruit salad came along, hence the current debate over 772’s new clothes. Early TranzRail blue repaints like DC 4922/4162 had a darker blue than the shade that was eventually settled on. DFT 7160 had a really light blue/gray for some reason.

3. Things weather and get dirty over time – exhaust makes things darker, brake and ballast dust makes the undersides lighter and yellower and redder. Little nicks and chips in the nose fill with dirt. It all loses sheen.

4. Even in 2009, different films record colours differently, and slides, negatives and prints change over time. This makes getting colours ‘right’ in the steam era especially challenging – exacerbated by the fact that colour films were still developing, if you’ll pardon the pun, and their cost limited their widespread use.

5. Lighting affects colour. A colour will look different in the sun vs shade vs cloud, vs haze, vs yard lighting, vs camera flash lighting. Even in full sun, our perception of colour changes dramatically between sunrise to midday to sunset. This has been solved (in theory) in the digital age by white balance correction… if your camera gets it right. Scale matters too. That tiny paint chip of Speed Racer Aqua always looks quite different when you splash it on the big wall in the toilet. And it will look quite different again if you have scarlet carpet in there. I don’t. I’m just making this up.

6. When things change format, someone (or something) makes a judgement call on how to translate formats and how that image should look. For example prints from negatives or prints from a digital camera at the chemist or the Fuji shop; scanning a slide; someone in photoshop or even a digital camera turning photons or data into a compressed, lower quality jpeg file; even printing a magazine - the RGB colours of a computer monitor are surprisingly different from the colour gamut that even a commercial publisher can produce on a CYMK printer.

6a. The web houses the least accurate and consistent colours. Just look at my website. Is your monitor calibrated?

7. Things get ingrained and perceptions get set. You saw a station painted that way at Glenbrook, so that’s naturally how you’ll paint yours. He painted his with Humbrol Trainer Yellow, so I will too. But did they get it right or was that a shade they happened to have lying around or fancied (Ian Welch’s green car on the Parliamentary special)? Most of the ‘modernish’ 4w wagons preserved in NZ are painted up in shades that look nothing like the way I remember them – and that’s just a 20 year old memory. Something tells me that W192 never looked that way 120 years ago either, but that’s what we see, so that’s what we believe.

Food for thought.