UA649 - Imperial Japanese Navy Camo Green Type 1

The green of Japanese naval camouflage

The acrylic paint Imperial Japanese Navy Camo Green Type 1 belongs to the naval part of the Lifecolor range and extends the Japanese palette beyond the arsenal grays alone. A uniform gray hull was not, after all, the only solution the Imperial Japanese Navy used during the war.

Why green appeared on ships

A green tone makes sense in naval camouflage where a ship is meant to merge not with the open sea but with a shoreline. Against a wooded shore, in straits and in anchorages among islands the background is green and brown, not blue-gray, and a uniform gray will on the contrary stand out against such a background. Green on its own does not hide a whole ship; it works together with gray, with which it forms irregular fields that break up the outline of the hull and the superstructures. This approach differs from the British Western Approaches scheme in its purpose and in its setting, but the procedure on a model is similar: a basic tone, a second color on top of it and softly led transitions between them.

Application on a model

The green is usually applied onto finished gray, in continuous fields rather than in small patches. The boundaries of the fields are led across the edges and the divisions of the hull, not along them, because it is precisely a transition across an edge that disrupts an outline best. It pays to work with thin coats and to let the basic tone show through under the green in places. On the superstructures the fields are usually broken down into smaller areas, because the superstructures themselves are broken up and a large continuous field would lose its point on them.

Intended for

• Japanese ships in a camouflage version
• The coastal and island scenery of dioramas
• Combination with the grays of the Japanese arsenals
• Modelers looking for less usual naval patterns