Dark Yellow 2 – really now?!
Tamiya Lacquer Paint LP-55
Tamiya Lacquer Paint LP-55 »Dark Yellow 2«, sprayed on a ROCO 1:87 scale Panzer IV Ausf. H, compared to Tamiya XF-88 »Dark Yellow 2« and AK Real Colors RC059 »Dunkelgelb nach Muster«. Clearly, one of these three supposedly “dark yellow” paints isn‘t dark yellow at all, it has a noticeable green cast. The closest match we could find for Tamiya LP-55 »Dark Yellow 2« is RAL 6013 »Reed Green«. Just when we thought that newly formulated Tamiya »Dark Yellow 2« was the holy grail of armour modelling, it‘s back to the drawing board for many of us; see our tutorial “Dark Yellow 2 – not”.
For decades, armour modellers have been arguing about the production quality and compatibility of paint used on military equipment. There are two irreconcilable factions: one argues that standard colours were produced to industry standards like BSC, FS, RAL, or RLM, and that these standards were not only easy to follow, but that they were relentlessly enforced even in wartime. It‘s a compelling argument. If you were a paint manufacturer in Germany in 1944, and your most recent delivery of »Dunkelgelb nach Muster« tended more towards the green part of the visible spectrum than it was supposed to, of course you would be denounced, tortured, and thrown into prison, if you were lucky!
The other faction points out that manufactures do make mistakes, that, particularly in a wartime economy, paint recipes sometimes cannot be adhered to, that paint needs to be stretched with cheap white pigment when other, more difficult to procure pigments are in short supply, and that tank factories could not afford the luxury of rejecting a paint delivery simply because the hue of »Dunkelgelb nach Muster« was noticeably off the RAL chart.
Tamiya LP-55 »Dark Yellow 2« appears to support the latter argument. Tamiya does not seem to be suffering any wartime supply contraints, they are probably using state-of-the-art computerized paint matching and mixing technology, yet they fail to produce an even vaguely compatible »Dark Yellow 2« from one line of their paints to another. And, Tamiya isn‘t the only company failing at this supposedly simple task: we have enough Airfix, Humbrol, and Revell paint samples in our inventory to indicate that paint can be noticeably different from one production batch to the next, even with our modern production processes.