"Polish crimson" Topic

Help me out here please. It surely has been covered but a search did not come up with this. My Perry Lancers of the Guard are coming on but I am not convinced by the "Polish Crimson" of their facings. I still have an unopened Humbrol enamel decades old but would not dare use it now. I always thought of it as more pink than red…but the re-enactors suggest the converse. Google finds various museum pieces like that and Osprey suggests they are right! The contemporary pictures are surely faded but seemed lighter and pinker.

I guess the answer may be we'll never know what was right and equally that it may have varied from time to time or according to tailor and cloth.

But, what do folk use? Cannot find anything from Vallejo. I've been using a pot of GW Citadel Screaming Pink (where do they get these names?) with a few mls of a lighter pink (Pink Horror) added…….

I've used the Howard Hues Polish Crimson, it's pinkish.

I have a pot of Humbrol Polish Crimson from 1979 and I can still use it. Most recently on the collar tabs of my WW II Soviet infantry. For whatever reason this pot keeps hanging on. I've had other pots go bad in a short amount of time.

Open your pot up, stir it up thoroughly and see if it still viable.

I use Stone Mountain's. it's a bit of a redder pink

link

Some great tips here. Many thanks.

I'm not sure about the Humbrol shade, to be honest, but I finally opened it a few hours ago, after 30 years. Mine was bought in 1981. I also found Rifle green, Prussian dragoon blue and French Artillery Green. Sadly the last saw more use and is now a crust in the bottom of the tin…but I'll keep it. The other three are still totally viable (as never opened).

Confess I felt like Howard Carter opening Tut's tomb after 3,000 years. The smell alone took me back to a time when I was poorer, slimmer and had much more (and much much longer) hair.

Going by the hues associated with artists colours of the period Crimson would be a deepish red on the blue side. The tendency today is to use the name for a brighter colour but of similar hue, possibly a bit less blue than of old (matching artificial dyes rather than natural ones).

The same name could be used for a range of shades of a colour – that was not unusual so a Crimson pink (albeit a fairly deep one) may still be referred to as Crimson.

re myxemail and deadhead; I too opened up my tin of Polish Crimson about five years ago after about a 35 year pause and it was still in good condition. It is the correct shade for the Polish Lancers.

Some Humbrol pots held up well and others did not. Most of the good Humbrol enamels came from those uniform sets (N/A now) eg. Napoleonic, ancient etc. I paint my figures with enamels only and it good to note that there other die hards out there as well.

I am not as educated as you folks are here, but I do take my Napoleonic colors seriously. To my understanding, Polish crimson is indeed a deeper, richer red. I realize a lot of paint companies do a lighter shade though.

Consider this… a lot of what we do have to go on of original colors has long since faded from its original rich hues. Much the same way as the whole Civil War Southern "butternut" arguement. According to a friend who is actually doing my painting of my 15mm Poles, what he saw in his reference materials and in person somewhere at a museum, the pictures in the old books/plates were much darker than what he saw on the actual coatee/jacket. The colors had indeed faded to a much lighter shade. UV light is not a pigments best friend.

Just my 2 cents. As an 1812 re-enactor, I have heard the whole "color" arguements for the last 20 odd years… when we go to make new uniforms, there is always the arguement on what the actual real hue/shade was. The honestly best way to find this out is to look at the dye recipies from the period and actually reproduce them… but we all know that even today, in mass production, companies produce different shades of the same color because no 2 batches of dye are identical.

Honestly, I say go with what you are comfortable with. As an example, I own an original Polish first uprising flag from the mid 1800's… it was supposed to be Polish crimson… it has faded to a near pinkish burgondy if that makes sense. Shades of red do not hold up well at all. They didn't have color lockers back then to help color stay fixed and not fade.

Oh how I wish Humbrol would wake up to re-releasing the old "Authentic" range – I miss the Prussian dragoon blue, Artillery green, Polish Crimson, British Scarlet et al.

Most of these I have replaced over the years successfully with Vallejo, but they never have sych evocative names (and Vallejo names seem to be created by a random colour generator anyway).

Those of you with you Polish Crimson pot – I envy you

Quite fascinating. I do like the argument to go with what suits you personally and I am slowly learning about scale effect in colours. I have painted two plastron fronts, one in Humbrol original 30 year old paint and one in Citadel GW Screamer Pink lightened somewhat. The latter looks more like what the re-enactors wear, the former looks better on 28 mm figures. They simply look more 3D at any distance

Oh this takes me back! That humbrol Polish Crimson was one of my favourite paints, though I seldom had a chance to use it.

In modern usage we would call it pink. However, as I understand it, the meaning of the word has changed, and at the time it would have covered only paler shades. Only later did the word extend to brighter, darker shades. So in the era they probably had no better word to use than crimson. Something like how in English we call azure "blue" unlike the Italians or Russians where blue only applies to the darker shade.

Interesting observations from Poniatowski about fading though.

A little off topic but I was looking through my paint stash today. I found the following unopen tins of Humbrol French Blue, British Scarlet, and Dragoon Green.

These are probably from the late eighties as this is the time frame I went totaly over to acrylics. Did the shake test on them and they're good to go. I didn't even remember still having any Humbrol's around any more.

I thought the French Artillery Green was the best. Who knows what the shade really was? OK, you can mix x parts yellow ochre with y parts lampblack etc, but we have heard about fading, inconsistencies etc. It was just it that looked just the way I had always imagined French Artillery. Well, I still have the dried crust in the tin's base to remind me……….

Oh lucky you Von B – French blue still slooshing around in your tin.

Now you need some Minifigs/Hinchcliffe to do them justice

And DH – I keep one of my old Minifigs cannons that had been painted in teh Humbrol artillery green deliberately unvarnished so I can match it each time using some Vallejo colours.

Happy days of childhood

Marc, I used to wear 28 inch waist Levis (flared), had hair that reached my costal margin (bottom of my ribcage), and was sure I would smash "the system". My Tradition 25 mm figures all disappeared in a messy divorce and I see them now as collectors' pieces on line. Several hundred of them….slightly indifferently painted I admit. Hinchcliffe were just starting to get it right with their latest (larger) releases back then. We need a nostalgia forum!

I have three Hinchcliffe cannon (4lbs, 12lbs and some kind of howitzer) in Humbrol colours and a dried out tin as a souvenir of past times……..

Be honest, acrylics are infinitely better and undercoating black never even occurred to me then! Weird idea. But it is so forgiving……..