1:25 Modelik Saint-Chamond

[CharlieC]

This model and the accompanying laser cut frames have been in my stash for ages. It's time to build it.

And there are problems even before the blade hits the card. The colours the model is printed in are just wrong. Or rather two of the colours are very wrong and the rest surprisingly accurate. Before WW1 most French Army equipment was painted a neutral grey colour known as "gris artillerie" (trans. - artillery grey). In the early part of WW1 it was realised that a single colour tended to stand out and did nothing to hide the outline of the equipment. Based on the artistic theories of the cubists and other modern painting schools a system of colour blocks painted over the gris artillerie base was adopted to try to simultaneously hide the equipment by blending with the background and disrupt the outline.

By 1915 various camouflage schemes were adopted which used a fairly standard set of colours - these were:

vert olive - (olive green)
terre d'ombre - (brown earth - red-brown but biased towards brown)
jaune ocre - (yellow ochre - clay yellow is a close match)
gris artillerie - (noted earlier)

Often the blocks of colour were marked off by black lines - whether this was an attempt to further disrupt the outlines or was simply a method to mark out the blocks of colour so multiple people could paint the equipment simultaneously isn't known.

Modelik has substituted black for gris artillerie on the hull and the grey colour they have used on the suspension is much too dark. The lines separating the colour blocks on the hull seem to be grey rather than black. However, the Modelik green, ochre and brown look pretty good. The model is of #706 at the Saint-Chamond works before delivery.

Step one is fix the colours - which might take a while.

Regards,

Charlie