"Vallejo Paints for WWII Aircraft?" Topic

Does anyone have any recommendations for specific Vallejo paints for painting WW II aircraft? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Steve,
Use this site;
link
for the FS numbers and then go to the vallejo site and use their cross refence pages from their catalogue.

Check out the Vallejo Model Air section on the Vallejo site.

Try to match to the colors in the bottle. You may have to remove the protective caps, which the store personnel won't like, but the colors are very different from those shown on their charts, and in their flyers, in many cases.

Good luck.

Corvette; take with a minor pinch of salt; some of the Vallejo to FS matches are a bit dubious. A few suggestions from my own experience are:

RAF
Earth Brown – 135 Beige Brown
Green – 90 Reflective Green (Russian Green is also a possible.)
Sky – 64 Pale Blue
Medium Sea Grey – 158 Medium Sea Grey….
Sky Grey (or whatever it was called; belly of late war kit) – 154 Sky Grey

USA
Olive Green – 94 Russian Uniform
Light Grey (Belly of above) – 155 Light Grey
Blue-Grey (Early USN) – 157 Dark Blue Grey
Very Light Grey (Belly of Early USN) – 154 Sky Grey

Gotta go to work now – post if these are any use and I'll dig out my German list; based on the Vallejo matches but with some alterations from personal experience.

Dom.

Dom,

VERY helpful – thanks!!

James

Thanks, as stated, very helpful and what I was looking for, though I was particularly interested in the Japanese and Russian colors if anyone has any suggestions for them.

Dom, appreciate the help. Need some ideas for those planes and decals I just ordered from you :).

Actually, Dom is being various gracious and kind….

Steve,
Go to the link I posted; scroll down and you will find the Japanese and Russian FS colours you seek. Yes, Dom has good advice to take the FS conversion with a little apprehension but they are still great starts in most cases. Also, be mindful that most painters prefer to tone colours down a bit by adding white while the FS conversions will be for the straight-up true to life tones.

or you could just cut out all the hassle of matching colours and FS numbers and what not with Vallejo shades etc and go out buy Lifecolor's acrylic paints

:-)

Dom do you have anything for Japanese colors?

Not at the mo, hence my silence. I use Russian Green for Oscars, and 153 Pale Grey blue for Nates, but haven't really looked at much else. Japanese colours (naval more than army) are rather a large can of worms, with different manufacturers using different shades, so I haven't really got stuck into them yet….

Dom.

PS – An interesting review of White Ensign's Japanese aircraft enamels; may help with getting an idea of the relative shades of different Japanese paints.

link

Dom.

Final PS – Zeros weren't white. They really weren't. Light grey, or even a very pale olive green for some batches, but not white….

I did a bit of the cross referencing of the chip to model paints. FWIW, I figure the Tamiya paints would be a pretty good match to the real colors. They have broken the light grays into IJN and IJA. The IJA light gray is much greener than the IJN gray, and is a fair match with Vallejo Green grey jn 106. The Vallejo is slightly lighter, but I figure the black wash will tone it down. There really wasn't a match for the IJA green though, and I had to buy the Tamiya. (I don't care for the small nor the bottles that Tamiya paints come in. So avoid them if I can, good paints though).

I wasn't painting IJN so I'll look for a match for their gray later.

I found the Tamiya paint not very good for brush painting, and reverted back to a craft paint. I found the Delta Cerancoat "Dark Forest Green" is a pretty good match. I made a mix of 5 to 1 Dark Forest Green to black was near perfect. You could argue ignore the black, and go for a slightly lighter shade of green.

Did Dom ever post the German vallejo paints to use?