GHQ Models Forums

In painting US halftracks and softskins:

1. What color for the vehicle (Olive drab ?) ?

2. What color for the canvas tops ? Khaki does not look right to me.

I use Pollyscale and Vallejo paints, but any generic advice would be welcome.

Thanks,
Rob

This has been discussed here numerous times. Here are some links...well one at least there are probably more about this subject you just have to search within the forum for more. But I beleive this one thread summed up what was discussed for years here.
http://www.ghqmodels.com/forum/viewtopi ... light=wwii

That is a great article on green for vehicles, but I also want to know what color for the canvas covers on the back of the 2.5 ton trucks....

Thanks,
Rob

Tarps were factory-dyed and varied in color. They started out dark but lighten quickly in the field. New, they varied: Dark Green (almost black), Chocolate Brown or Tan/green. In the field, these colors lightened into many variations.

For new use: Vallejo 889 (USA OD) mixed 50/50 with 872 or 887

Troy

Blinx wrote:That is a great article on green for vehicles, but I also want to know what color for the canvas covers on the back of the 2.5 ton trucks....

Rob:

There are a couple examples of folks going over choices of colors for truck tarps in the "Show Us Yer Stuff" thread. I heartily suggest looking it over, but at 130+ pages it IS getting a bit long in the tooth.

So here is a bit of what I do. Not that you should necessarily do the same, but maybe you'll get an idea or two, and find it to your liking.

First, I don't look for "the right color" for truck tarps. My own experience, looking at trucks with tarps, is that no two are the same. Canvas, even more than metal, tends to weather quickly. Different trucks, even within the same unit, will have tarps of different ages that have seen different amounts of sun, rain, saltwater, and dust. So even if they did all start out the same color (not necessarily true), they will be at many different shades at any moment in time.

I use Polly-S paints. For any one unit of trucks, I pick two or three different colors. Among my favorites are Sahara Sand, Khaki, and Olive Green. I also use Old Concrete, French Khaki and Soviet Green from time to time.

Then I undercoat the trucks differently from one to the next. I generally use white primer on all my vehicles. But then I might base-coat my trucks the color the metal of the truck will be. On some trucks I'll also base-coat the tarps, on others I won't. If they have tarps over the cabs as well as the cargo beds, I might mix and match base-coating and not base-coating the cabs vs. the cargo beds on some. Then I'll use maybe two or three colors to paint up the various trucks, again mixing and matching which color goes on the cab vs. the cargo bed on some trucks, but not on others.

Here is a quick look at the results:


Sorry I don't have pics of any US trucks. These are Italians. But you can get the idea from them, and apply it as well to US forces.

These trucks are in-process. The trucks have been primed white, and base-coated in Italian Gray-Green. I used two colors for the tarps: Sahara Sand and Khaki. You can see how different they look here. You can see some of the tarps were base-coated with the Italian Gray-Green, and others where just white before the tarp color was applied (the truck on the far right was base-coated over the cargo bed, but left white over the cab).

At this point it is kind of scary, because the khaki is looking WAY too brown for my tastes. But ...


Here we see the finished trucks. Can you pick out the one that had the cab left white, while the cargo-bed was base-coated? The weathering (wash and dry-brush) were all done identically across the truck bodies and tarps, and it has served to level them out a bit into what looks like various levels of dusting and fading of the same base canvas.



And here are the same trucks, making an apperance on the gaming table. That is, after all, what I painted 'em up to do. And I am quite happy with the results.

Anyways, just my ideas. Not right nor wrong. Try as much or as little as you like, and if it turns out well (in your humble opinion) then take a picture or two, post 'em up, and tell us what YOU have come up with. We'd all love to see and know how you're doing your trucks.

Speaking as someone who wrote a lot of that earlier thread, more progress was made in 2008 & we found nearly all the color chips, paint specs, & even had the opportunity to test sealed paint manufactured in 1944 to the color chip it was prepped to. It's a very messy story, not because quality control was bad, but because so many agencies were involved, & specs & color cards were seperate, & each changing often, on seperate schedules. Yet the story does sum up neatly. Here are some key points:

1) you can't base vehicle color based on saved ammo boxes. The ammo boxes used completely different shades, and were always gloss or semi-gloss also.
Up unitl mid 1943, ammo boxes were prewar OD22, a dark brown glossy OD. In mid 1943 when the new colors were issued, this changed to OD202, a deep green semigloss dark OD, for about 6 months. Then it changed to the new OD108, a full gloss dark, low chorma khaki green color that would look brown under sunlight. This is in the same color region as the USAAF OD41

2) forget about OD9 for now (makes it simpler) as it was Engineer stuff anyway & was not a factory paint

3) Vehicle colors & helmet shells used the same colors at about the same times. From 1941 until mid 1943, this was a flat low chroma, semi-dark khaki green that was called "Class 204" OD. In mid 1943 this color changed to the new OD319; it was the earlier color lightened which brought out the green more (Testors 1165 is a good match to this). This is the color you see black stripes on Shermans in France, & why there is so much contrast between the OD & black in color pics.

4) OD9 was an Engineer color that changed once in the war. Upon it's invention in December 1941, it was a dark very deep green OD (like the postwar early 34087). This was a camouflage paint meant to camo infrastructure from aerial observation (to make a factory look like a forest for example). In 9/42, when it became clear the US wasn't going to get bombed, this color was changed to the Class 204 mentioned above, & stayed that way until the end of the war. In 1956, the engineers changed back to the 1941 color.

5) OD202 mentioned above is the semi-gloss version of this 1941/56 color, and appears in some 1945 pics of vehicles & helmets

Actual paint in the can tested perfectly to published chips. Quality control (at least by war's end) was excellent even by today's standards.

Field drab. Anybody's, Vallejo, Testors, MM whatever, like on these two trucks. A little weathering with any light shade of tan to customize them and you are good to go. A side note, the OD I used on the vehicles, (Humbrol 66), is a little too gray for my taste, I have since switched to MM Acrylic OD ANA 613 which is greener.