RAF Day Fighters pre-war to 1941

Paints for British day fighters up to 1941

The set covers the appearance of Royal Air Force aircraft in the period when polished biplanes gave way to camouflaged fighters. The upper surfaces carried an irregular field of dark brown and dark green, known as the Temperate Land Scheme, which was to hide a machine seen from above over the English countryside. The underside meanwhile changed faster than anything else: prewar aircraft flew in bare metal, at the beginning of the fighting a split black and white underside appeared so that friendly machines could be told apart, and from the middle of 1940 the pale blue-green tone of the Sky type became settled.

The eight bottles match those very stages. The pair of dark brown and dark green to the British standard forms the basis of the camouflage, the light Sky belongs on the undersides of later Hurricanes and Spitfires, the white serves for recognition areas and stripes, the aluminum for prewar surfaces and propeller spinners, and the black for the counterparts of the split underside. The two remaining tones, a light green and an earth yellow, suit training machines and versions exported overseas.

Working with the shades

The shades of the range are filled into bottles of seventeen milliliters and are ready for use in an airbrush. Before drawing the paint it is advisable to shake the bottle thoroughly, because the pigment settles to the bottom, and to spray in thin coats at low pressure. For a brush they suit small touching up rather than large areas. The matte surface, once dry, stands up to varnishing and to shading afterwards.