I have been playing around with adding white to colors to achieve the effect of haze and scale viewing distance from the subject with a 1/4" scale model.

I have concluded that it is not worth the effort. Also, the group at the local hobby shop brought up some good points, among them:

1. Black is black.
2. There wasn't nearly as much air pollution even 50 years ago, so there would not have been as much effect from haze; and
3. No one can dispute the exact colors because the eyewitnesses are all dead.

Any opinions from this group? Specifically, is there a scale at which you would use scale effect, but would not at larger scales?
{Bob Andreotti}

To render a scale color, one must add a small amount of the complementary color (opposite on the color wheel - to gray the color - black will not work to do this kind of graying) and then add white - producing a color that matches the prototype color when viewed from an actual 75 to 150 feet away for a 1:48 scale model that will be viewed at 18-to-36 inches away (twice the prototype distance for 1:96, etc.). Scaling the colors for application on a model, along with using several shades (layman's term) of the same color (several highlight shades and several shadow shades), makes a tremendous difference in making a model appear to be a prototype that has been reduced in size and is still in the glaring sunlight (or moonlight, when appropriate as in a night-time diorama) - rather than a caricature of a prototype in toy colors (single prototype colors applied in scale ... pity). A side-by-side comparison of two similar or same models, each painted one of the two different ways, is very telling - once the difference is seen, toy colors are left behind.

Why spend a year or more building a model only to cover it with inappropriate colors, especially colors of only one shade that happen to be way too saturated and unscaled? Paint your ship model the same way that a military miniature soldier is painted - there is absolutely no reason that the painting techniques of soldiers and ships should be different - for best effect. The soldier painting technique is not difficult and the results speak for themselves when they are applied to a scale model ship.

Black is not black (same for white) - even in prototype. Anyone thinking thusly has not been observant, especially for scale effect. In scale, black is properly a very dark gray (sometimes cool, sometimes warm - depending on the surroundings) and white is properly an off-white (showing the various reflected colorings of its surroundings - not a uniform off-white by any means).

Get a black poster board and cut it into one square as large as can be made. From the remaining strip, cut a small black square as large as the width of the strip will allow. Prop the large black square on one side of a room. From the other side of the room compare the perceived black colorings of the two squares while holding the smaller black square. If they are different, how are they different? Try this simple experiment again in the sunlight at the prototype distance for your scale viewing distance. We did this simple experiment at a South Bay Model Shipwrights club meeting at night and indoors only - there wereno disbelievers in the need to scale black to a dark gray that was surprisingly much lighter a gray than what was initially expected.

I hope that someone tries this easy experiment and reports their findings (to include the distance(s) across the room, and/or the yard, and the hand-held distance) to this listing.

I have actual paint manufacturing formulae for interior and exterior paints for the painting of houses and ships that were published in 1812, to include the exact pigments from early 1800s America. Having made such paints, I can tell you they were all dead flat within a day's drying time - which would have to be even flatter in scale to appear correct. (Yes, you must also scale the shine.) The eyewitnesses of early 1800s American ship paints and their colors are not all deceased - for several have seen my 1812 paints at South Bay Model Shipwrights club meetings (southern San Francisco Bay area).

Every scale model, regardless of scale, needs its colors scaled. A scale model is an attempt at creating an illusion and nothing destroys that effect quicker, except for poorly executed human figures still on their bases, than poorly executed painting of the model. Unscaled, saturated colors on a scale model scream, Look at me! I-m not real!

Are tree trunks brown? Mostly no - most of them are gray! The major exceptions are the conifers and the palms. This comes from seeing - not looking with a preconceived, incorrect notion. Model paints should have of nature and of the physiological and psychological perception of seeing (not merely looking). One must still, however, be observant in an unbiased manner with no preconceived notions. We should strive to duplicate what is actually seen ... rather than what is wanted to be seen ahead of time. Color can not be described a priori - you have to mix-to-match the prototype color while positioned the prototype distance away from the prototype color that the model will normally be viewed in scale distance, as above.
{Ray Morton}

There are a number of factors that affect the way in which we view and use colour, and what suits one may not suit another. My own preference is for the judicious use of scale colour, and I rather think a number of your assertions could be open to comment.

The first thing I would caution anyone against is the simple adding of white in slavish adherence to some mystical formula as has been proposed by the model aeroplane press in particular. There are far too many variables of weather and light for this to be an effective approach. You need to develop an artist's eye for what is right - look at paintings and see how much pure black and white is used, look at the way distance lowers the overall contrast and shifts any colour toward its complement - reds tend towards cooler shades, blues to warmer. Add the fact that over any body of water there is a lot of light scattering and the effects may be even more noticeable.

Even with this you may get stuck on occasion, which is what happened to me very recently when trying to scale down a red-oxide colour which kept going murky brown on me.

Here I really must disagree, black definitely isn't black at more than a few feet, though it may be less susceptible to the effects in some conditions. Even a first year art student will know not to use pure black or white on a painting. If you make no other attempt at scale colour, I would seriously think about toning down that black, not with white, but with a warmish light brown. Similarly let down the white with a drop of grey

Not nearly as much air pollution? Harrumph:-) Well, in some places maybe but not round these parts - the air's a lot cleaner than it was 50 years ago. We're also looking at haze caused by water over sea, which is potentially a rather different proposition to a blanket of yellow smog in it's effect on different colours - why do you use a UV filter when taking photos over water? Remember that haze is only one factor in the scale colour effect, atmospheric scattering does most of it.

I'd be more convinced by a small scale model where the modeller had made an effort to just tone things down a little. And, yes, you can dispute the colours to some extent to the extent that it was say Home Fleet grey and not Mountbatten Pink - what we can't do is say that it was painted FS36014 and that is how it looked at 10:00hrs on the 3rd July 1943, in a sou'wester off the Azores. That's where the eye of the artist comes in.

It's not so much the scale as the reason for building the model that would affect my choice of the nature and intensity of an colouring system.

In case 1 we might be looking at a dockyard model of a Stuart warship. I'd be very dubious about applying scale colour here, since the reason for the model was to display natural wood, with the carving gilded and coloured. Here I'd suggest you might almost want to emphasize colour, by using artists oils and making the richness and depth of the colour a feature. Similar reasoning might be applied to a formally displayed model of clipper with her yards squared and sails unbent.

Case 2 could be a 1/700th model of HMS Compass Rose, in a sea setting, weathered and battered by the wartime North Atlantic gales. Here, I'd really think hard about the use of not only "scale" colour, but also colour tempered by the grey light which might further lower the contrast. In this second case we are really thinking about what is effectively a 3D painting, the paint serves to give the sense of time and place as much as the model itself.

In between these two cases are a myriad of possibilities; how successful the model is will to a large extent depend on how clear your vision of the final product is. If the approach is consistently one of displaying craftsmanship to the highest level all the way though, then scale colour may be superfluous. OTOH if, like me, you are generally trying to produce 3D paintings, where the model only serves to give the paint the right shape, then you might find developing an eye for scale effects will help breathe life into your models.

Lastly, please do paint her under the same type of light that you intend to display the model under - artificial light can do weird things to your carefully chosen mixes.
{Aidrian Bridgeman-Sutton}

The same effect can be used on models to make them appear farther away, and thus more "real" and less like a model - it fools the eye into interpreting what it sees as a large object 48 meters away instead of a 1:48 scale object one meter away. Adding a slight amount of light gray or white to the color is the usual method.

There is also the matter of scale perception of color. A small area of a color will look more intense than a large area of the same color, which is what gives models a toy-like appearance in some cases. By toning down the color with a little gray, it looks more "realistic," even if it is technically inaccurate. This is related to the phenomenon of rigging sizes - if you use accurately-sized thread in rigging a scale model, it tends to look too small. Some model builders deliberately use slightly overscale rigging to make it look correct. Just one of the paradoxes of working at scale.

If you follow the logic to its absurdly rigid conclusion, you can come up with some odd things. For example, if the "rule" says that you should add 10% white to a color for every 100 feet (30 m) away that you want it to appear, what about a long object, like a ship or an airplane wing? If you are viewing a large airplane from the side, the near wingtip might be 30 meters away, but the far wingtip will be 60 meters away. Should you graduate your paint from 10% at one tip to 20% white at the other? And then what happens when you look at the model from the other side? With boats, if you are looking at the end, you have the same problem.

There is also the matter of lighting. How will the model be displayed? Will it have a spotlight on it, or will it be in a corner of a room with only ambient room light? Will it be in a glass case (which can alter color perception)? If you are going to take color compensation seriously, you need to take into account the color temperature of the eventual display lighting when mixing the paint.

The problem is that "scale color" calculations are really intended for painters working on flat canvases intended to be viewed from a specific vantage point, not for three-dimensional objects that might be viewed from any angle. Shadow-box mountings, since they constrain the eye, can use similar techniques to advantage, but free-standing models probably do not need to worry too much about exact proportions.

With all of that said, I like a model to be accurate in scale, so I use scale size rigging, but I find paint colors straight from the tin too intense. I tend to tone down bright colors to make them look a little less intense and a little more weathered, usually by adding a few drops of light gray. Red is a little trickier to lighten without it turning pink, so I have used a medium gray there to take the edge off the brightness, or started with a duller red.

I don't want to start the "is shipmodelling art or craftsmanship" discussion here, but scale color is one of the aesthetic choices we make. Painted or unpainted wood? Fully planked or exposed framing? Rigged or admiralty board? Sails or no sails? Weathered or straight from the builder? Although it is sometimes presented as a question of accuracy, and elaborate theories quoted to support particular paint mixes, it is really a question of how you want the model to look and what kind of impression you want to make.

When we painted the 1:10 model of Vasa at the museum here, we tried to get the colors as close to what we had analysed in original paint chips on the ship, and did not employ any lightening for scale effect. Because the model is so big (7 meters long) and people see it up close (1-2 meters), it seems to work fine, but I suspect it gives the model a little more intensity or gaudiness than the real ship had.
{Fred Hocker
Vasa Museum}

Fred Hocker makes some very perceptive remarks on color and distance. However, it's more complex than even he states. With distance, certainly color appears to be paler than when close, but it also is less saturated (has less color). Adding white or grey alone to simulate this effect (called 'aerial perspective' by painters) is insufficient. One needs to consider two steps.

First, reduce the chroma; the amount of color present. For instance if you have bright red, it needs to have less redness. Rather than adding white or grey, add a very small amount of the complimentary color to red. This is the color found on the opposite side of a color wheel. In the case of red, it happens to be green. Now, this is counter-intuitive, but it works. It reduces 'redness' without making it paler.

Secondly, you can add white or pale grey to tint it, which means making it lighter. This is actually a slight simplification: when viewing a color at a distance through the atmosphere, red wave-lengths of light are either scattered or absorbed more readily than blue end of the spectrum: this is why distant mountains, etc, appear bluish and the daytime sky is blue. For a really distant effect, a small amount of blue also needs to be added to the mix. However, this is unlikely to be required unless working on a diorama at a very small scale.
{David Antscherl}

Model ships are the one model genre where scale effect is really valid. Before I retired my specialty was electro-optics, and the effect of the atmosphere affects electronic sensors in the same way it affects visual perception, so we all studied those effects a lot. The "bible" is a book called "Vision Through the Atmosphere," by Middleton.

Essentially, look at the color of the sky near the horizon. The perceived color of any object at a considerable distance is a combination of that color and the actual color of the object. The further away the object is, and the lower the visibility, the higher the percentage of the "sky horizon" color. The effect is inverse exponential with distance. Eventually the object will disappear (the definition of visibility.

I do not change color on model cars, planes, etc. I consider something called scale viewing distance. That is, say you view models normally at a distance of three feet. scale viewing distance converts that by dividing by the scale. So if you are looking at a 1:72 scale model, the scale distance is 3/(1/72), or 216 feet. On normal days you will not see scale effects at less than about 500-600 feet. But for model ships that means many scales SHOULD show some scale effect. I mix in a bit of very light blue-grey into my colors for the smaller scales like plastic models. For 1:96 scale I do not do this. For 1:192 (1:16 scale) it is a judgement call. I may not model the scale effect (then again I may) but I always consider teh weathering effect.

Note that the scale effect is NOT the same as weather effects. Any but the most modern paints chalk and bleach after exposure to air and sunlight. I DO add white and make finish flat for any model except contemporary ships, which I do not model much. THIS effect is most pronounced on horizontal surfaces, so I overspray decks with a light grey- a VERY light coat with an airbrush that just tints slightly the deck. I do this primarily on painted decks, not wooden ones. For the later I use a wash.
{Don Stauffer}

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