Israeli Air Force paint set (modern rotors)

Israeli helicopters and their desert tones

A helicopter in the desert is camouflaged differently from an airplane. It flies low, it often stands on the ground among rocks, and most often someone sees it from above or from the side rather than against the sky. That is where the make-up of this set comes from: earth tones that tie the aircraft to the terrain dominate it, and gray and blue appear only as additions.

The foundation is a pair of browns, one earthy and one lighter, together with a sand yellow and an ocher. These four shades allow a multicolor desert pattern of the kind Israeli aircraft wear to be put together and graded according to how faded it is meant to be. The fifth tone is a darker sand, the sixth a gray-green shade known from the helicopter units, the seventh the light gray of the undersides and the eighth a prominent blue.

Shades by a standardized table

Every color carries a standardized number from the American color standard. That is practical for the builder for two reasons: it can be used to track down what the tone should look like on the real aircraft, and it can also be compared with the paints of other makers if a bottle runs out in the middle of the work.

How to build the pattern

The desert schemes of Israeli aircraft have soft transitions. They come out best with an airbrush from a short distance at low pressure, where the edge of the patch blurs by itself. It pays to start from the lightest tone and add the darker ones, because the opposite order calls for more coats and the detail of the rotor head or of the grilles soon fills in.

The sun in a desert environment bleaches paint quickly, so after a few months in service an aircraft looks different from one freshly polished. The set offers enough closely related tones to suggest that fading by lightening the upper surfaces and leaving a more saturated color under the booms and in the sheltered recesses.