Acrysion - RLM75 šedá

A medium gray with a lilac cast

The second of the pair of gray tones that covered the upper surfaces of German fighters from 1941 was lighter and had a noticeable cast into violet. It alternated with the darker gray in an angular pattern on the wings and the spine of the fuselage, and in later years it held on in a slightly altered form right to the end of the fighting, when on some machines a dark green completed it.

On a model the tone behaves differently from what is expected. Next to the cool darker gray it looks markedly warmer, whereas on the palette on its own it reads as fairly unremarkable. Anyone who tries it out only on a piece of scrap without the neighboring shade easily concludes that it is too pale and darkens it needlessly.

Tips on the shade

The pattern is best created by spraying the whole upper surface with the lighter color first and adding the darker one over it. The reverse order means more coats, because a light tone covers a dark one worse and the boundaries of the pattern are then harder to hold.

The medium is thinned with water, stirred from the bottom and works best in an airbrush at a lower pressure, where a thin line can be laid. On late machines the surfaces tended to be heavily worn and repairs in a different tone appeared between the panels. A model gains when the pattern is left deliberately imperfect in a few places, because that is exactly how machines finished in makeshift conditions looked.

The transitions of the pattern can be softened by a light pass of heavily thinned paint over the finished boundary. It is applied from a distance and in several rounds so that the line is not smeared all at once. The same procedure helps to even out the places where the paint seeped under the masking and where a sharp jag would otherwise stay visible even under the stencils.