Acrysion - půlnoční modrá

The paint that covered the whole airframe

At the end of the war the US Navy abandoned the three-color division and went over to a single very dark blue paint across the whole aircraft. Machines from 1944 and 1945 therefore look almost black in photographs and only direct sunlight gives the blue away. In this form flew the late Hellcats, the F4U-4 Corsairs, the Helldiver dive bombers and the Bearcats, which only caught the very end of the fighting.

The same blue stayed on American decks after the war as well and lasted on machines of the Korean period into the mid-1950s. Anyone building postwar carrier hardware can get by with it for the whole model, including the propeller blades.

Working with the medium

The paint is acrylic and it is thinned with water. On a large continuous area the base causes more trouble than the shade itself: every scratch left by sanding shows under a dark paint, so it pays to go over the surface with a fine paper and degrease it before you reach for the airbrush.

Stir the container down to the last settled residue at the bottom. Dark paintwork surfaces saturate quickly, but the saturation is easier to keep in hand at a lower pressure and a lower delivery than when the area is flooded all at once. The modeling eye benefits when a light lightening of the upper panels is brought into the finished paint later; a uniform dark area reads as flat on a small scale model and takes the shape away from it.

Anyone who decides to weather the surface has little room on so dark a tone. Dry pigment shows up more strongly on it than on a light surface, so it is recommended to reduce the quantity and rather to add steps. What can be brought out are mainly the leading edges, the area around the exhausts and the places around the cockpit where the crew moved about.