BLACK & CREAM WHITE VEHICLE INTERIORS

A dark interior is not painted with black

Anyone who has ever painted the inside of a hull with pure black knows how it turns out: the parts merge, the edges disappear and all that is left of a carefully built superstructure is a hole. Inside a real vehicle, moreover, no surface looks the same. Light falling in through a hatch pulls the upper edges into gray, while the corners under the seats stay dark. It is precisely for this reason that this box is built as two sets of three, where every tone has its role — the darkest into the corners, the middle one on the surfaces and the lightest on the edges and projections.

Two ranges, six bottles

The first set of three leads from a cool dark tone through a middle gray to a light gray and serves everywhere the interior was meant to come across as dark. The second begins with a warm pinkish base, continues with a grayish middle tone and ends at the cream ivory that the light interiors of German as well as Allied equipment carried. Both lines can be combined, because they share the same binder and the same degree of gloss. The dropper cap allows the mixing ratio to be measured out drop by drop, which comes in useful when you want to create a step of your own between neighboring tones.

Practical advice on painting interiors

An interior is painted before the halves of the fuselage or the hull are screwed together — after that you can no longer get into the corners. It has proved itself to spray the middle tone, pull the edges out with a dry brush in the lightest shade and leave the darkest for flooding the corners with heavily thinned paint. An oil wash then sits well on a finished base and joins the sharp transitions between the three tones into a smooth whole.