Lupa15's Victory at Sea: Imperial Japanese Navy

Little Wars TV recently announced a painting competition for the Fall.  I figured that this was a good time to tackle some of my historical miniatures backlog and paint my IJN ships.

While I considered painting the ships in a grey tone I was actually inspired by fourtytwo’s World War 2 at Sea project to do some research on the IJN camouflage.

Note that I am not aiming for 100% historically accuracy but a close approximation.  Aiming to gather as many reference images and understanding of the camouflage scheme as possible I ended up gathering the following images.

After obtaining these reference images the next step was to pull out some paint swatches. This would help me understand what the main colors are and reduce it to a handful of paints.

Using the images above I determined that there was a darker green, a mid tone green and a bright green, light grey and brown used in the schemes.  Additionally as the wood deck takes up a large portion of model and I wanted to find a good color to match the references.

I took those colors using Paint 3D and added them to a black, dark grey, light grey and white background. This is an old art trick I learned in graphic design to better understand the actual color without being influenced by another color.

From the swatches above I then referenced my Citadel paints and picked out a few of the closest colors.

Wood Decking – Baneblade Brown

Dark Green – Loren Forest

Midtone Green – Straken Green

Light Green – Elysian Green

White Grey – Corax White

I did decide to drop the brown as I think it would be too similar to the wood decking at the scale I am working with.