August 16th, 2007

I was browsing the forum at Elvas Tower today and came across a post on a set of Great Northern ALCO S-2 diesel switchers. All three models were beautiful, and all by Gaetan Bellanger and Rick Franzosa. I'm still not sure how hey get those photo realistic textures, but they look great. I noticed that the "green" on all three paint schemes looked more black (perhaps warm gray is a better description). Tim Muir took note of this and related that the GN units he remembered were this other shade of green, not usually used on models of GN equipment.

Tim attached the image shown at the right as an example of how he recalled the units appearance.

In Tims' picture, the "green" is very dark and looking at the screenshot Rick posted looks to be almost black, but actually a VERY warm chocolate color. It may be a grayish brown (if such a color exists), but it definitely doesn't look "green".

I've noticed before, but when painting Pennsy units. The majority of models, real or virtual, show PRR "brunswick green" as a kind of warm gray green. Very few photos of any Pennsylvania units display this color. In most cases I've seen it's more like the chocolate color shown on these GN diesels. On photo in particular shows a Pennsy Centipede sitting on the ready track and it definitely has a rather splotchy brown tint. I tried using it on my own virtual centipedes, but it just didn't look right. I settled for the color shown here.

Anyway, this got me thinking about my own models of the Great Northern W-1 twins, #5018 and #5019. So I opened up the textures I had made way back when and tried a little "color correction".

The picture on the left is the original texture set, based on color charts at 3D Trains and input from other simmers. The center image shows how I modified the green and orange after looking at the Elvas Tower thread. I reduced the red and blue components of the green and lightened the orange with a sample taken from the image Tim posted.  It is essentially a washed out version of the original, but doesn't look anywhere close to the units Rick and Tim were discussing.

So I tried again, this time increasing the red component. I tried to make it appear more "brown" than green..I tried small steps, changing the colors by a fraction of a shade...The colors began to look more like the original texture set, but nothing I would call "brownish"..

Looks too olive, but does remind me of the GN units I've seen. The trouble with that is I have only seen photos of Great Northern equipment. By the time I visited the Pacific Northwest, the GN was a fond memory. Tim, on the other hand, has actually stood next to the real thing and seen it without the filter of camera and film.

This is probably one of the most challenging parts of modeling. This is especially true when dealing with railroads like the Pennsy or GN who insist on using VERY dark green instead of black. The Lehigh Valley "Cornell Red" is another hard to match color. In some photos in looks almost dark violet. In others it's more like rust. Once again, most of us have never seen the equipment we are modeling. We are dependent on the photographic record of Fallen Flags. The images that survive were affected by so many factors, including the camera technology of the era that produced the photo. Early color films were not the same as current offerings, and far different from the digital technology so prevalent today. Time of day, weather, atmospheric conditions, film speed, and a host of other things come into play. Then there is the fact that color is a "perceived" quality. The brain must interpret the light waves bouncing from an object into something that makes sense to the rest of the psyche. There are even more "filters" to consider, not to mention things like color blindness. Color, for the most part, is subjective.

One other thing that affects the color of our models is language. This sound s odd until you realize that people or more likely to say "it was more pink than that" than they are to whip out a pen of exactly that color for you. They can only describe what they see in their mind, not actually show it to you. So you have to keep changing shades until they say, "that's more like it". Of course they can only go by what they remember the color to be. It's very similar to a police artist trying to create a sketch based on an eyewitness account. Pretty close is about as good as it gets.

Well I think that's about it for now...Thanks for listening.