As always, your color research is second to none, my friend @lgardner! Great shade choice! Nothing wrong in using a "Luftwaffe" paint in a Japanese plane: if it looks right to the eye, it probably is!
Greetings from QC1 and QC2! Looking forward to your painting!

@lgardner - RLM76 actually sounds pretty good.

I just checked, and Mr. Color 117 - RLM76 - comes out when stirred completely in exactly that shade on the Millman color chip. Whodathunkit.

George R Blair Jr (@gblair)
Thank you for the compliments. I'm actually quite pleased with how this model has been going together. Lately I have been ultra busy with our home repair project, so my bench time has been limited. Most of the time, I try to get the colors as accurate as I can at the time of my builds. Sometimes I go down the rabbit hole a little deeper than I do on others. This is a kit I had been wanting to build for a while now, so I had been collecting some information about it beforehand. This seemed to help a lot, since I knew roughly what the game plan was before I got busy with it.

The major mistake I made was using the Japanese navy color "Ameiro" on the dorsal gunner's compartment turtle deck. Now the clear canopy is permanently glued in place I will have to live with it. I made a mistake and should have known better. I didn't realize that I had done it until I looked at the pictures I posted here. Then it stuck out like a sore thumb !

Your trio of Hudson's are looking wonderful and I hope to see the paint on #3 soon. It would be great if we got a new tool Lockheed Hudson... even an Electra would be nice, both in my preferred scale of 1/48. We are indeed living in the Golden Age of model building. I never dreamt we would end up with a very nice Ki-21 in 1/48... but we did ! Yippee !

Now a nice 1/48 Mitsubishi G3M "Nell" would be even more appreciated.

Thanks buddy for stopping by, and the continued support.

Merry Christmas too.

John vd Biggelaar (@johnb)
Hey John ! Thank you for the compliments. I think the color choice of using the MRP 066 is going to be a good one, especially when I look at the computer generated color chips that Nick Millman has generated and posted online. He has probably forgotten more about these Japanese colors than I ever knew. The proof will be how it looks once it's sprayed onto the model. That will be the ultimate test. I will take it outside and grab a few pictures of it once this is done, and this should give us a good indication if my choice was correct or not. It will also get some Dark Green randomly sprayed on top of this color for the upper camouflage.

Merry Christmas to you and your family. Take care my friend, and thank you for stopping by.

Looking forward to the paint session, Louis @lgardner
Thanks a lot and Merry Christmas to you and your family as well. Wishing you all the best.

Here is tonight's update.

I have some masking pictures to show, and some more information on the choice I have made for the Dark Green color that was used on the upper surfaces of the Ki-21.

So hang on while we take this ride !

I am happy to report the dorsal gunner's greenhouse canopy is completely masked now.

... as is the main pilot's canopy.


All of the rear fuselage windows are done as well. These could have turned out a little better. If I'm not happy with how these look, I might actually knock them out after the model is painted, and create some new ones using some Testor's window cement. It's too early to tell just yet though. I will definitely be coming back and pressing the tape down tighter against the clear windows. It's lifting a little on some of the edges. Masking all of these tiny windows are the worst part about building this kit... but they were on the real plane and I think ICM has done a great job of replicating them.

I have removed the Tamiya masking tape from the leading edge of the wings, where it was used to cover the Yellow IFF stripes. These Yellow stripes were not present on the aircraft the AVG flew against in late 1941 or early 1942. Going from memory here, they only came into use sometime around September 1942. So these are going to be painted over.


Some of this freshly removed Tamiya tape was then salvaged and used to mask off the window panels in the nose section.

http://www.aviationofjapan.com/2013/11/ijaaf-paint-colour-standard-21.html

Now lets get to the color choice I have made for the Dark Green. Once again, it's based of an article that was written and posted by Nick Millman at the Aviation of Japan website. The link has been provided above.

He talks here about the Japanese Army color called #21. We often hear it being called Midori Iro, or "Green Color". This was often a color used by the Japanese Army aircraft depots to camouflage the upper surfaces on their aircraft in the field, after they were delivered from the factory in the original colors.

Then he goes on to describe how these colors look using his digitally produced color chips. Here he is using scans of various model paint colors.

Not surprising, none of them were a spot on match to the original color, which is listed on top of his color swatch.

One thing I noticed was that he mentioned the MR Color 129 Nakajima "Dark Green" was a good color to use when you took into consideration the so called "scale effect". The best match however was White Ensign Model ACJ 05, Nakajima Green.

As luck would have it, I happen to have a bottle of the Mr. Color 129 on hand, but I don't have the WEM paint available to me. I will be spraying out a color chip card and if I like how it looks, and I'll use it on the Sally too.

Here's one thing that we should keep in mind about these color choices I have made. There's no definite way to know for 100 percent certainty, these colors I picked out are correct.

The possibility exists that captured, or even some local paint stocks could have been used too. If this is the case, anything goes... and I think you will be perfectly fine to simply pick out a Dark Green you like and roll with it. This is supposed to be fun. Dare someone to prove you are wrong... 🙂

In the end, these two paints are my color choices. The Dark Green will likely look a little bit different when compared to my home made color chip card, simply because I will be spraying on thin coats, with it being applied heavier in some locations.

Also the base color will be the RLM 76 color, and not a solid white background like the paint card will have.

We are expecting some rain over the weekend, so I'm hoping that I will get a little break from the home improvement project, and get in some decent bench time. This may sound a little silly for a grown man to say, but I can't wait to get the paint going on this model !

The masking is getting closer to being done, so hopefully it will not be too much longer now. All I have left to mask is the rest of the bombardier / front gunner's position windows, and the landing light covers.

Then it will be show time !

Merry Christmas everyone, and as always comments are encouraged.

Thanks for stopping by.

That MRP RLM76 looks very very close to the Mr Color 117 RLM76. I have that Mr Color 129 Nkajima Green and will use it also.

Thanks for your multiple trips through the minefield here, @lgardner.

As always your research goes the extra mile! Merry Christmas Louis.