Methuen Colour Handbook: a useful tool for us or not?

[Nigel Jackson]

Hello All

The work I do is supposedly part-time. Well, by that I mean I'm paid part-time and at the moment my brain is being frazzled by the questions my students ask of me. So I need some lighter relief for a few minutes and wanted to ask what forum friends thought of the following.

A short while ago I noticed a posting (please excuse that I can't immediately track the thread or the author) which referred to the glorious old Scale Models extra on Model Colour (published in 1977 judging from an advert in the back pages). It contains an article on WWI Aircraft by Ray Rimmel and is supported by several A4 pages headed WWI Aero Colour Table which I think may have been the work of Ian Huntley. If I was looking for names to put my mortgage on then messrs Rimmel and Huntley would be pretty much at the top.

The table provides colour names, Humbrol mixes, application notes and Methuen references. I duly noted that PC12  was equated to a then Humbrol HS216 Rust and a Methuen range of 8(E-F)8. Now I know that Ray has made it absolutely and helpfully clear that 'red-brown PC 12' is a misnomer and that as an overly-simplified rough guide ... PC 12 [was] akin to 'chocolate brown' (See Windsock Worldwide 29/1 p. 24 and more significantly the article Coloured Thinking in 28/4).

This all led me to maybe a foolish trip around the internet first to see if I could find an online version of the Methuen Colour Handbook. Even before I'd got very far I realised the apparent stupidity of this since such highly nuanced work would be inevitably at the mercy of differing system availability for the viewer. And anyway, I've argued before now that PC 12 can mean different things to different people, without (within limits) any one of them being necessarily wrong. Another outcome of the wild goose chase was that I became aware of the enormity of the science of colour.

I found numerous colour wheels - and I'm sorry to have rambled on so long - but I eventually came to some questions. Is a work like the Methuen Colour Handbook  a useful tool for us? How many of us actually have a hard copy which might enable us to have a common basis for discussion?  Is there a danger that tying a colour to a Methuen reference, or even range of references, tends to fix our thinking.

Oh god! Another wave of emails has come in from my students .....

Thanks for indulging me.

Best wishes
Nigel   

[Jamo]

I heard that the Methuen Hand book was not readily available and very expensive, so out of the reach of 99% of modellers

[DaveM]

Hi Nigel,
I'm afraid it was me who made the reference to Methuen in response to a colour query,which I hope would help point the questioner in somewhere like the right direction.I don't normally like to quote exact colour references as I've teetered close to the edge over colour matches in the past,preferring to take them as a guide now,but,I do do think they are a valuable source of information that can lead to a informed opinion on the whole question of correct colour matches.I've never actually seen in the flesh a Methuen book,and Jamo is correct,they were not readily availabe and costly.As an aside,I looked on Ebay UK,and there is a used copy for sale at the moment,starting price of £175.

Dave.

[Nigel Jackson]

Hi Dave

Gosh, I hope you didn't think I was being critical - that was the last thing in my mind and I was very grateful that you reminded me of a really good old source.  I suppose that lurking at the back of my mind was that we can sometimes see references to a specific colour in the Methuen Handbook without many of us ever actually being likely to have seen one and looked at the colour as presented there.

A starting price of £175 seems ridiculous, but perhaps that's the going rate. If  I had the money I'd have to ask myself: Handbook or maybe three WNW models? That would be a no brainer for me.

Best wishes
Nigel

[Des]

AbeBooks.com have a 1978 edition for $89.95 plus post, Amzon has one adverttised as 1984 for $389 and another for $589.00.

Des.

[uncletony]

Just a note for those in the US -- anybody in the US can request to check out a copy from their local library via the library interchange system. The library of congress has at least several copies of Metheun that will be loaned out.

[DaveM]

Hi Nigel,
no,I didn't think you were being critical and apologies if it sounded as if I was in my response to your post.As The Red Baron stated,colour charts are ideal for 1:1 replication,but wear and tear,weather,combat and scale all play a consideration in the actual colour of the finish.Sorry if this sounds sacriligios to some,but I'm in the school of 'If it looks right,it is right',it all boils down to what floats your boat and I respect anybody's view on how they interpret colour.
Now,where's my FS chart.......!!!

Dave (the colour un-coordinated!)

[GrahamB]

Hi Nigel,

if you ever need a Methuen value resolved let me know - I can usually match to a household paint range chart/colour cards (such as Resene). I posted a long thread on the (can I mention it here?) Aerodrome site a few years ago converting many published Methuen values (Dan-San Abbott, Ray Rimell etc). Search 'Resene'. I could resurrect it here but am always happy to help out. It is a nice system, better than the US FS version, as one can see the underlying hue for each page - useful for searching paints for colour mixing/ 'scale effect' etc.

Cheers,

GrahamB

[Nigel Jackson]

Hi Graham , that certainly sounds like some interesting and valuable work that you did.

Dave, I note to my embarrassment that today is not far off the first anniversary of your posting. Do forgive me for not getting back. I'd have to say that I agree that it's very much a personal thing and that there is unlikely to be a single all-embracing solution. It's just that I like experimenting and dabbling in these tricky finishes and it can be helpful to get a sense as to whether I'm a million miles away or not.

Best wishes
Nigel

[GrahamB]

Hi,

this is the kind of thing: the Aerodrome thread was getting too complicated as we were being drawn almost into producing an RGB/Methuen system rather than showing simple paint matches. If this is useful I could re-post most of the tables in a separate thread here - and put up other tables that were in preparation or were being revised. My skills at producing the tables are not hot and I relied on Brian to do that.

If your are not Australia/NZ (me) you could use other paint companies' colour finders (using RGB value) to get a match. I like having a real 'chip' in front of me rather than working back from a screen image.



Cheers

[DaveM]

Gawd,has it really been a year since that posting!I found a site many moons ago,but it doesn't include what you are really after Nigel as there is no Methuen comparison.It lists FS,RLM,BS against a wide range of model paints that can be useful though.
 http://www.paint4models.com/paintchart/paintconversionchart20100101d.htm

Dave.

[Nigel Jackson]

Thanks Graham,  that's a very useful sort of chart.

Indeed Dave, time passes so quickly.


Best wishes
Nigel

[ALBATROS1234]

it sounds interesting and i wouldnt mind having a copy of the manual but, would i actually use it for my modelling. i doubt it. not very much, not enuff to warrant spending any money on one. i like to mix custom collors that look good to me for each model. i base my choices on what ive seen online and in person. i heard somewhere that no 2 people see the same color the same way. so what does a chart really mean. perhaps to regimented for an art form like this. now if i were restoring something for a museum and it had to be dead on maybe.

[GrahamB]

Hi Albatros1234

the point of Methuen and other systems is only to give a fixed point to a particular match - no modeller is obliged to slavishly follow these matches for their model but they provide a starting point and an indicator of a proper hue that I think is important. An example is the many models one sees, still, of RAF aircraft with bluish 'Dark Green' whereas it was a yellow-green. They thus give you 'directions', if you like, (especially the Methuen format that is arranged by saturation and tone for a particular hue - 30 of these - but compared to 360 in Resene's system) to modify for artistic and scale effect. On the Aerodrome thread we were also very very careful and insistent that the purpose was to give modellers a good impression (if not 100% spectroscopically/optically accurate) of given Methuen values - with no view as to whether these were themselves accurate and precise matches to any materials. Dan-San Abbott's Methuen values contain many that are only generic - derived from a colour name/description - but may be the best we have.

What you are doing sounds fine to me - there is no 'colour police' - but others, like me, have a fascination with this subject and like to project this onto our models as part of the hobby.

Cheers,

GrahamB

[ALBATROS1234]

oh yes of course, i hope i dint offend, i tend to spit out my take on a subject without thinking how others may perceive it. i just meant to say at this point for me it would be neat to have but wouldnt be worth spending a large amount of money to just get a starting point when i already have a decent starting point with all the research i have done on the subject thus far. and color is sort of an imprecise science to my way of thinking. many times i say such and such is blue and someone else says no its turquoise so who is right? color is such a personal thing. and with our lack of color photos,remaining aircraft and taking degradation or weathering into account a precise color match would seem impossible.