SOVIET AIRCRAFT COLOURS 1941-1945

The palette of Soviet aviation of the years 1941 to 1945

Soviet camouflage changed during the war more than that of any other great power. The green and black areas of the first months, when the machines were lost against forests and fields, gave way from 1943 to a two-color gray scheme designed for combat in the air over a broken landscape. The undersides stayed light blue the whole time and the interiors kept their characteristic steel gray.

The set covers precisely this development. It contains eight shades: interior steel gray, camouflage green, black, light blue, blue-gray, dark gray, light brown and a light yellowish brown. Combinations from these bottles will spray a fighter from 1941 as well as a machine from the last fighting over Berlin, without any need to mix shades from tables.

The shades are matched to each other, which shows above all at the boundary of the areas: the pair of gray tones gives exactly the contrast we see in pictures from 1944 and does not turn toward blue. It is sprayed in thin coats, and the transitions between the fields can be suggested freehand or with the help of modeling putty.

The set suits fighters as well as ground-attack aircraft in all the usual scales, from small machines to large models.

When choosing a scheme it helps to know the background. Machines from the first months tend to have a soft transition between the green and the black from above, while the later gray scheme was sprayed using templates with sharper boundaries. The final look was moreover strongly influenced by the weather: the paints faded and went matte quickly, so the surface of a machine after a few weeks with a frontline unit looked different from the day it was taken over.