My first scale project ...
I wrote this page before the PH-AGQ became my subject; kept it because it may be informative to some modelers.
The colors of G-AAGC
The colors are not known... black and white photographs
is all there is. You can't interpret the shades of grey
in old black and white photographs as colors, but it
is possible to draw some conclusions.
First notice on old photographs: what you see is not grey-values of colors! A colored surface reflects light with a certain wavelength and it's this wavelength that activates the silver in the negative. With the old photographic processes the result can be very different from how dark or light a color is.
My friend Bert Hazeborg built a model of a Koolhoven F.K.49. This aircraft was painted a very dark green and had a Dutch air force cocarde on its side which is clockwise red, white and blue with an orange spot in the centre. In his documentation he has a panchromatic and an orthochromatic photograph of the fuselage side. At the panchromatic photograph this very dark green is mid grey; the cocarde blue is a very light grey, almost white; and the cocarde red is dark grey. At the orthochromatic photograph the dark green is darker, but not as dark as the cocarde red which is black and the cocarde blue is a mid grey as you would expect it to be.
The surface is also important. In the first picture of the previous
page you can see at the wing how the same color shows light at smooth
plywood and
shows
dark
at
the
strokes
of
fabric.
How dark or light a color would show on a photograph was also influenced
by an endless row of other factors: season, time of day, weather, lenses,
developing, paper, printing... you name it. The shades of grey do not
tell you everything.
It's like reading between the lines. You have to look for differences and similarities, and combine these with other knowledge you have.
The photographs I scanned for my documentation are prints from glass plate negatives of the same session. The first photograph, top left and on top of this page, has a Dutch air force Fokker in the background at the far right. I enlarged this Fokker and saw its cocarde having three very different shades of grey… meaning: the photographs are orthochromatic.
At first I expected G-AAGC to be finished in black and orange with silver wings, just like the Shuttleworth's restored Desoutter Mk.I in NFS colors. I also thought this because of this illustration in a Desoutter brochure that could have been very well an artist impression of the Desoutter 'Dolphin', which was actually the Koolhoven built G-AAGC modified by Desoutter.
Because of these two examples, black and orange seemed to be 'Desoutter colors' and it was very well possible that G-AAGC, which was bought as example for the Desoutter licence production, was finished in the colors desired by Desoutter. And why wouldn't it be possible that National Flying Services, which placed a big order at Desoutter, received them in these colors as well?
Nevertheless it seemed to me that the fuselage lower halve was to light to be orange. It could also have been crème-white. The top halve could have been black, but knowing the photographs are orthochromatic, red or bordeaux-red was another possibility. (Orthochromatic negatives are insensitive to red.)
Then I noticed the shadows underneath, one very vague, another very sharp. Light conditions varied from cloudy to sunny. In these different conditions orange changes from dark to very bright, but the lower halve does not differ that much at all, which can only be if it's white, crème-white because it clearly has some tone.
With this theory I returned to the curator of the Koolhoven Aeroplanes Foundation. He attended me to this picture of Desoutters in different schemes... apparently there were no 'Desoutter colors'. Red and crème-white was indeed a possibility.
The wing was silver for sure. Aluminum paint was standard priming in order to protect glue and fabric from breaking down by sunlight. Sometimes the bottom of the wing was only varnished to save weight, but enlargements of the photographs clearly show this was not the case with G-AAGC. Only a transition from light to shadow can be seen, there's no borderline, no different finish.
Wing, stabilizer, elevator and rudder are similar to each other at all photographs, so these were all silver.
The curator provided me some more facts. Registrations and logos were always painted black. Steel tubes, struts and gear, were also always painted black. The Palmer tires were black rubber. The backside of the prop was always matt black as anti-glare and the dark turtle-deck between windshield and cowling could be anti-glare as well.
Then he had a good look at the photographs himself and my theory proved to be right. He noticed the tires and anti-glare of prop and turtle-deck differed from the top halve of the fuselage, suggesting this was a different color. I still had some doubt because the top halve looked pretty much the same as registration and struts. However when I enlarged the photographs, I could see that each letter and the logo was less dark than the 'black' directly above. If it was both black, it would have been the same paint and it had both gloss varnish over it. Only possibility left: the fuselage top halve was red... considering the fashion of those days and the combination with crème-white, most likely bordeaux-red.
So this is how G-AAGC must have looked like:
