Sky Blue Pink with a Finny-Haddy Border

With better luck, this would have been a post about my trip on Saturday to the Durham Light Infantry Museum (that’s right, madam – in Durham), but I didn’t make it. After dithering over the weather forecast for an hour longer than I should have, I left home around 10am – Durham is about two and a half hours drive from here, and the museum is open 10:30 until 4pm.

The A1 in Northumberland, on a relatively dry day...

Alas, before I got to the border the rain was torrential, and it remained so – could hardly see through the spray, and I had the demister blowing so loud I couldn’t hear Wes Montgomery on the stereo. Not good. Near Stannington, not far north of Newcastle, there were some fairly routine roadworks, which required two lanes of the dual carriageway to merge into one, to be joined shortly afterwards by a busy slip road coming in from the left. Much too demanding for your average British motorist, I fear – no-one will give way; merging of traffic lanes is a simple process, screwed up by heroes (mostly in white 4WD BMWs, on Saturday) who insist on driving up the closed outside lane and forcing their way in at the bottleneck, thus gaining some 200 feet of priority in the queue, but stopping the whole thing dead. By the time I reached Washington services my Durham ETA had slipped by some 50 minutes, and the rain was coming on heavier again, after a brief lull. At best I could expect to get about an hour at the museum before it closed, and I was growing anxious about delays on the return trip. I had coffee and a piece of industrial chocolate cake at Washington, cast an expert eye at the lowering sky, and then headed for home, muttering. The weather and the traffic were both better than expected on the way back, in fact, and I survived to attempt the trip again in a week or two.

So – no news of Durham, and I wouldn’t recommend the chocolate cake.

Right – subject 2.

Painted miniature of an officer in the 1802 uniform

I am preparing to paint up another regiment for my 1809 Spanish army – this will be two battalions of the Regimiento de la Corona, and I intend to paint them in the 1802 regulation uniform, which involves jackets in what Godoy specified as deep sky blue – a shade which seems to be interpreted in a wide variety of ways. I have seen actual sky blue, and the Peter Bunde plates show it as a sort of royal blue. Hmmm.

Peter Bunde plate - not helped by the current state of my scanner

Any opinions on this? I was going to try for a sort of medium blue, not too psychedelic – my preferred options at present are a choice of two old Citadel colours which I have to hand - Ultramarine Blue, and Enchanted Blue – I have no idea what these are called now. I have the Cronin and Summerfield book, the Histoires et Collections volume on Ocaña and all the Bueno books for the period – inconclusive – in any case my colour vision is probably a bit dodgy anyway, but the problem with plates in books is that the reproduction is uncertain, and we don’t really know what the author intended.

So – Spanish soldiers, 1802 uniform – “deep-sky” jackets with black facings, edged red, red turnbacks, brass buttons – what do you reckon? What shade of blue? All clues welcome.

Railway Paint – and a trip to the Dark Side

Current Humbrol Acrylics

In the days before Humbrol introduced their Military series of enamels – with specific Napoleonic colours and everything – I tried all sorts of ploys to find shades of paint that were otherwise unobtainable. I had an expert acquaintance who used to tell me that I should use artists’ tube colours, and mix my own – the implication being that only a prat would do anything else. [See details of Foy’s Tenth Law for a discussion of this kind of advice.]

I would fix him with the closest thing to a sardonic glance I could muster without a rehearsal, and say something profound, like “wuff wuff”. Apart from the hassle and the mess, the chances of ever getting the same shade twice – maybe even once – convinced this particular prat that a ready-made pot of the shade you actually want takes some beating.

In the pursuit of this, I discovered Humbrol’s very extensive Railway Authentics, which were really useful. I must have a great many patches of colour in my Napoleonic armies today which come from the world of model railways, though the original pots solidified and were ditched decades ago. I recall that for a long time you could not get a decent orange or crimson shade in the standard Humbrol ranges, so I had a pot of an orange paint intended for painting the coachwork lining on railway carriages (company and date unknown), and to this day the pennons of the Vistula Lancers show a deep crimson which started life as LMS Maroon.

One slight issue with the railway colours was that the authenticity extended to the degree of gloss, and they expected you to know what was what. LMS Maroon, for example, was a semi-gloss. At first I used to add Humbrol’s flatting agent to quieten down the shine, but I realised pretty quickly that leaving the paint as it was and applying matt varnish over the top was the way to go. For reasons I cannot remember, I started very early to use Cryla Acrylic matt medium as a glaze, and I am still delighted with it. Forty years down the line, it is as clear and pure as when it went on, which is very much preferable to the subsequent yellowing and crystallization of the solvent-based varnishes I used from time to time. Humbrol’s clear varnish of the day was not a long-term answer to any question at all.

Yesterday I was travelling about a bit, and took the opportunity to visit a branch of a large chain of wargaming model shops, which happens to sell Citadel paints. Not my most comfortable environment, but I thought I’d risk it. First problem was the paint rack – they had both the old and the new names on display, and the stuff was not well enough sorted for me to find my way around it. I was going to ask for some clarification of what the “layer” paints were, so I hovered near the check out for a while.

The young man at the checkout was deep in conversation on his smartphone, enthusing about an army of Darklings[?] a colleague was preparing. That’s right – you guessed correctly – they were awesome. After some five minutes of this, I remembered my new theory that somehow the special lighting in these particular shops does not reflect normally from me, and the young man would not be able to see me. I also realised how humbling it would be to have to ask for an explanation of white paint, so I left quietly, wondering if the CCTV could see me.

I subsequently visited a very large, independent model shop in the same city which sells everything you could think of, apart from Citadel paints. The staff in this shop can see me perfectly, and they are always very focused on the possibility of someone pinching a radio-controlled aircraft or a dolls' house and walking off with it. Anyway, I found the rack of Humbrol railway paints, which are now acrylic, of course, and which still offer an interesting range of unusual shades. I got some plain matt white, and something called RC417 (RC = Rail Colour), which was described on the rack (though not the pot) as “off-white for carriage roofs”. Could be just the thing for ECW stockings and suchlike.

A humble purchase, but I was pleased to renew my acquaintance with railway paints. Really quite nostalgic.

Old School Paint?

I must have reached some critical shelf date for my paint stock. A few of the old, polygonal GW/Citadel pots  I bought in the mid-noughties (at the start of my wargaming rebirth) are going off. As I've said elsewhere - and it was just as uncool when I said it last time - I like these paints. The pots are practical, they are simple to use, there is very little waste and they can be stored a long time (though not forever, as I am learning). My Blood Red went solid a week or two ago, so I had to get in some new. Now - disaster - the pots of white are turning gloopy on me.

A few practical issues have to be addressed. The only hobby shop that ever existed within 40 miles of here went bust a few years ago, so purchase of paint requires travel or - more practically - online mail order.

If I have no local supplier, and I don't like Citadel's newer pots so much (the lids won't stay upside down to act as a little palette), I also have a slight issue in that, having come to terms with seriously applying shades like Bubonic Brown and Snot Green to my beloved models (any grown-ups at home?), I now have to get the hang of new, though equally daft, names for the colours, since some 14-year-old marketing wizard must have decided that Snot Green isn't so great after all.

I like the Foundry paints I've used, though they are expensive to obtain here and I find the shade system impressive but bewildering - too much hit and miss without personal recommendations. Vallejo are good - I have some Vallejo colours (including white), but find them fiddly to use and I waste a lot when I mix them. A day or two ago our esteemed Monsieur Rosbif pointed us to a blog post where an expert sets out an astonishing presentation of all the weird and wonderful substances he uses in his painting and modelling. Once again, it is forcibly drawn to my attention that I am not - and never was - a proper painter. Not like those rude, heroic, beer-drinking Frothers people. So I am best advised to get the baby stuff and plod on quietly.

Back to the point - what to do about my white paint? Since the Citadel option is not so practical nor so convenient as it was, I took a mad turn and decided to revisit a brand of paint I used to be very fond of in the 1970s - Pelikan Plaka. In the interests of scientific research and unscientific nostalgia, I ordered a pot of the casein-based white acrylic I once used to swear by. In its/my day, Plaka was a major breakthrough for those of us who wished to paint white crossbelts over Humbrol red jackets, and were fed up watching the colour bleed through white enamel. At half-an-hour between coats, that was not a lot of fun.

It's arrived. I haven't used it yet, but I hope to shortly. The pots are redesigned, of course, but I believe the paint is still the same. If the white works, I might just give the yellow a try - I find it very hard to achieve a solid colour with yellows. Only problem with the yellow might be the shade - I used to have a very pale, lemony shade of Plaka - I assume they have others.

So anyway - this is today's non-news. If you are a Plaka fan, forgive my excitement - it's not often you get to leap back 40 years in a single step.

Subsequent Edit:

This is off the original topic, but I got emails from Ludovico, Jean-Marc and Lawrence Lander asking for more information about the changes in the Citadel range. Here is the only listing I have, which was kindly pointed out by Lee some weeks ago. I know nothing about the new range, nor how closely it matches the old one, but it seems there has been a move towards multi-shading. The only active, maintained stock of Citadel paints I've seen recently is in the Edinburgh branch of Hobbycraft, and they seem still to be using the old names, so don't ask me. I know nothing. A big boy did it and ran away.

New names - still daft?