Acrysion - IJA zelená

The green of the Japanese Army Air Force

The Imperial Japanese Army gave its aircraft a dark green paint on the upper surfaces of the wings and the fuselage, while the underside stayed light or in bare metal. In this form flew the Nakajima Ki-43 fighters, the Kawasaki Ki-61 with its inverted V12 engine, the late Ki-84 and the Ki-46 reconnaissance machines over Burma, New Guinea and the home islands.

A peculiarity of those machines was that the green was often sprayed in the field, by hand and without much care about the boundaries. That created irregular patches and bands with the original surface showing through between them. On a model it is imitated by free spraying over small areas or by applying the paint over peelable putty with a piece of the base left underneath.

What to watch out for

Green tones saturate once dry, so the first spray usually looks paler than the result should be. Let the surface rest a while before you decide to add more; a green cannot be undone and too heavy a coat fills the fine panel grooves.

The medium is stirred down to the bottom, thinned with water and works best in an airbrush at a lower pressure. On machines that stood on field strips the green was quickly bleached toward a yellow-green, mainly on the upper wing at the root. Anyone who wants to capture that impression adds a little lighter tone into part of the paint and goes over the upper surfaces with it before the stencils and the washes come into play.

Anyone building a machine from the last year of the fighting should count on the green looking markedly more worn by then. Patches were oversprayed, the areas around the canopy were handled bare and differences in tone appeared where repairs had been made. A model from such a time takes noticeably more color variation than a machine from the beginning of the campaign.