Modern Luftwaffe Vol 1 Set

The gray finishes of today's Luftwaffe

After the war the Luftwaffe moved on from polished Sabres through the green and brown schemes of Starfighters and Phantoms to the cool grays of today's machines. The difference between the individual stages does not lie in the shape of the patches but precisely in the shades, and those differ from one another only subtly, by a few percent of brightness, by a cast toward blue or toward green. Mixing them by hand is therefore thankless work, and a ready palette saves a great many tests on an offcut of plastic.

The six comprise Dunkelgrau to RAL 7021, Light Compass Ghost Gray matching FS 36375, the dark green-gray tone FS 34079 with the British counterpart BS 641 given alongside, Camo Green listed as RLM 82, Dunkelgrün listed as RLM 71 and the dark gray FS 36152. The combination handles both the two-tone gray finishes of fighter aircraft and the darker multicolor schemes that German machines kept throughout the Cold War.

What to watch out for with gray finishes

Cool grays are merciless to the surface underneath: a seam showing through, the difference between plastic and filler and the slightest scratch all appear under them at once. It is worth pulling the whole model together with one base coat first, therefore, and only then building the color fields up. Panel lines are brought out under a light gray only very lightly, otherwise the model quickly slides into caricature.

The green tones in the package also suit cases where the transitional schemes of the 1970s and 1980s meet today's gray finishes in one display case. It is exactly the comparison of two generations of the same service side by side that tends to be the most effective at shows.