UA645 - Imperial Japanese Navy Yokosuka Grey

The Yokosuka arsenal and its naval tone

The arsenal at Yokosuka at the entrance to Tokyo Bay was one of the four great bases of the Imperial Japanese Navy and, like the others, prepared its own ship finish. The acrylic paint Imperial Japanese Navy Yokosuka Grey makes this variant available to ship modelers in the scales where fine differences of tone matter.

Gray and scale

With ship models a phenomenon comes into play that shows itself most of all over large areas: the smaller the scale, the lighter the resulting surface should look, because in reality hundreds of meters of air lie between the eye and the ship, lightening the tone and reducing the contrast. An exactly mixed gray therefore often looks darker on a small model than the ship looked in reality. The arsenal shade forms the base on which the brightness can be worked further according to the scale and according to how the model is meant to look.

What to do about it on a model

It proves worthwhile to apply the arsenal tone as the starting point and to build a lighter cast only on top of it, area by area rather than evenly across the whole hull. The upper parts of the superstructures and the surfaces turned toward the sky will stand more brightness, while the lower parts of the side and the recesses stay in the basic tone. The result is a surface that has depth and yet keeps one recognizable character of gray. It also helps to compare the model with a period photograph, because even on a black-and-white picture it is apparent how the brightness of the individual areas was graded toward the water.

Intended for

• Ships associated with the arsenal at Yokosuka
• Models in the small ship scales
• Work with the grading of brightness on a hull
• Completing the palette of Japanese naval grays