JonBius.com

Color Theory in Scale Modeling

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As I attempt to write this blog post, it occurs to me I’m probably one of the least qualified people on the Tubes of You to talk about color theory. Everything I know of the discipline is lifted from simply listening to people far more qualified than I am. So if you get to a point that you think “this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about”, I probably don’t.

I have, however, watched every Bob Ross “Joy of Painting” episode ever made. So I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.

Yet despite all the times I try to convince myself I am a fairly humble man, the irony of spamming a video this long about a subject I am little qualified to speak on indicates I may not be quite as humble as I think I am. If anything, it seems to parade my arrogance and hubris in front of all.

But…

I put together this video a while back for Patreon, and now that I am no longer on Patreon, I thought I’d slop use some of those older videos on YouTube because I was late getting anything newer completed. I did add a bit on to the front that is new, so I suppose it’s not entirely recycled nonsense. It does include roughly 7% new nonsense.

And THAT was mostly included to avoid YouTube scrubbing its backside on the carpet and wetting itself in a tizzy because I dared use something again. The joke is on them, I suppose… I actually only know about 12 things, and I just present them on different models to make it all seem 47% more differenter. So it’s all really repeat content.

Now, if you want to hear a real artist speak on real color theory, watch these three from Mark Carder (a proper painter) and in far less time than I take he gives a masterclass in color theory:

Now, if you still want to watch 50 minutes of me rambling on about things that appear to be color related and listen to my confident assertions that I know what I’m talking about, here is a video.

Your mileage may vary…

Comments

4 responses

  1. John Hood-Fysh

    Thanks Jo0n, good to see this in the general audience feed. I found it to be very useful

    Reply
    1. Jon

      Thanks John!

      Reply
  2. Mike

    Jon, I watched this video on Patreon, and watched it again on YouTube, and learned something new each time. If I remember rightly, the Patreon release coincided with my colored-pencil experiments with color mixing. I’ve become proficient at limiting my palette with colored pencils, but my ignorance with specific military colors (ocean gray, sea gray? light medium dark?) keeps me buying specific paint colors.
    That’s okay – luckily I model at a snail’s pace so I should never go broke buying paints, which is nice :-).

    Reply
    1. Jon

      I’m so glad to hear it is helpful! Thanks for the kind words.

      Regarding military colors – I found that quite often “close enough”, when combined with typical aircraft weathering techniques, will yield a realistic finish in scale. For example, one of the Spitfires I built… it *may* have been an RAAF green/brown/blue scheme, though I can’t recall for sure… was painted with some Tamiya colors, out of the bottle, that were close enough. Knowing that my weathering would lighten and desaturate the colors, I planned accordingly. Later, a “notorious” color Nazi who apparently had a photo-recall memory of ALL color chips from ALL sources for ALL time saw my model – and was going on and on about how accurate my paint colors were. He asked what I used, and when I told him, the sounds of the clutch plate of his cognitive dissonance grinding was epic.

      Plus, while a color may be spot on when first applied… weathering will shift it anyway… so technically it’s no longer “correct” anyway.

      Thus you can start incorrect and make it look correct, or start correct and end up incorrect – and they the outcome looks about the same.

      I’ve found life to be simpler with TLAR Standard colors – that looks about right.

      🙂

      Reply

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