Help needed for Carrier paint colours

[Gerard Auckram]

Hi I'm intending to paint my NZ carrier the 28th Moari Battalion North Africa colours. The photo attached is off a scale modeling website. I need to convert to either RAL formula or Pantone formula for the local paint shop to make up. I have the name of the colours but they aren't common enough to be in the database.

[Jakko Westerbeke]

First up: good to see you’re actually trying to get the colours right instead of going with somebody’s interpretation of 1970s incorrect notions of what they were

If you buy yourself a copy of Mike Starmer’s The Caunter Scheme, it has paint chips in the back of the book, of model paints that he has matched to the real colours as closely as he could. You can e-mail him at mikestarmer18@gmail.com (that address is also on this site about his books, so I don’t think there’s much of a problem with posting it here).

Alternatively, buy yourself this set of model paints from LifeColor:



Or only the individual colours you need, of course. Just search for "LifeColor paints” and you should find model shops that sell them. The UA-numbers under the samples in the image above are LifeColor’s paint numbers. If you paint some swatches with them, your paint shop should have a good sample. Beware, though, that LifeColor paints are really poor for brush-painting, and need a lot of coats to cover even moderately well if you do. They cover well enough when sprayed, but because they come in 22 ml bottles I don’t think you want to be spraying them through full-size paint guns They thin and clean up with water, BTW. Trying to use anything else often results in thick goo that’s hard to clean out.