Acrysion - tmavá zemitá

The earth brown from the Battle of Britain

The best known British wartime scheme rested on a pair of brown and green on the upper surfaces. It was exactly this brown that gave the Spitfires and Hurricanes their characteristic look in the summer of 1940, and the same combination was worn by the Blenheim and Wellington bombers as well. The pattern was painted to a template, so it repeated on production machines and a build can follow it quite accurately.

On fighters the brown lasted until 1941, when a gray replaced it on the upper surfaces. In the desert units it stayed longer, though, and was combined with a lighter sand tone, which is a rewarding variant for modelers, because such machines tended to be far more pronouncedly worn.

What to do with the paint after work

Brown earth tones hold a lot of pigment and settle in the container faster than other shades. Stir them every time, even if you used them a few days ago, otherwise the resulting tone shifts into gray.

The paint is acrylic, it is thinned with water and applied by spraying. The boundary between the brown and the green was only slightly sprayed on British machines, so masking with putty raised above the surface gives a more faithful result than free spraying. Once the work is done, close the container and flush the airbrush before the medium dries; dried acrylic residue is considerably harder to remove from the nozzle than fresh.

On dioramas the brown finds use beyond the airframe as well. It matches the dry soil of an English airfield, a wheel track in grass can be brought out with it and it serves as a base under dust layers on the landing gear. A diorama thereby holds together in color, because the same pigment appears both on the machine and on the ground beneath it.