Mr. Color - půlnoční modrá

The dark blue of carrier machines

Midnight blue is so dark that in daylight it hardly gives away that it is a blue at all. US naval aviation moved to exactly this saturated tone at the close of the war, when it abandoned the earlier three-part schemes and began covering the flying surfaces, wings and fuselage in one uniform finish. The shade found an even darker use on night fighters and on machines that were meant to merge with the darkness above the sea; it also serves wherever a shadow variant of another blue has to be mixed.

Building up the coats

With so saturated a color, every unevenness beneath it shows, so sand the area with fine paper before spraying and clear the dust away. It is applied in thin mists until the surface beneath disappears; one heavy coat fills the engraved seams and the detail vanishes. Water curdles this paint into flakes, so reduce the consistency only with thinner for nitro paints. Drying is a matter of minutes and the film then holds firmly even on smooth surfaces with no primer.

So the model does not look flat

A uniform blue-black area looks dead on a model because it has nothing to reflect light off. Lightening the center of large panels with the shade thinned by a drop of white or light blue and leaving the edges darker works well. Salt-bleached and worn areas around the walkways, around the gun bay covers and at the wing root supply the rest. A final semi-gloss clear coat evens the whole surface out and hides differences in sheen between individual sprayings. Anyone building a machine with large markings on the fuselage will also appreciate that a dark surface raises the contrast of white and yellow motifs considerably.