ISRAELI SINAI GREY

There has been a lot of discussion for years over the exact nature of the colour Sinai Grey. Whilst visiting Israel in 1998 I was able to collect a few samples of IDF Sinai Grey from exhibits at several museums. The colour varies depending on its age and the effects of sun, sand, wind, rain and wear and tear. The bottom line is that the shade of colour is a brown shade of yellow sand.

Steven Zaloga in the Concord book Tank Battles of the Middle East Wars (2) The Wars of 1973 to the Present refers to the colour as a dark kakhi drab – a valid description. Vasko Barbic in his great set of articles on IDF armour in the mid 1980s referred to the colour as a mixture of sand, grey and a little white.

COLOUR REPRODUCTION
The shade has never been referred to as a shade of green. Some books that reproduce IDF vehicles in colour have very poor quality control and the colour of tanks range from deep bronze green through the more accurate colours to almost orange. I have some photos of a Nagmashot (Centurion based APC) that is a bright orange. This leads to a lot of misinformation to the uninitiated, who assumes that the colours are real or accurate. I recommend that you take all full colour photos with a pound of salt.

FILM AND LIGHTING
I personally took two photos of the same vehicle at Latrun with the same film, same camera, same lighting, with only seconds between photos but from different angles and on one photo the colour was pretty accurate and the other comes out a shade of yellow/green mustard. With this sort of variation it would be difficult to reproduce the exact colour of the vehicle. Different film manufacturers tend to contaminate the original colour recording. Different film manufacturers have different biases with their film manufacturing. I am told the Fuji film has a green bias for example.

COLOUR
Humbrol matt kakhi 72 is a good match for the full strength colour. These are a good match for the colour swatches I was able to pick up both here in Australia and in Israel from IDF vehicles. If you want to produce your own colour you can start with a base on Humbrol sand yellow 94 and add some medium Humbrol 126 in the proportions of 3:1. You could vary the proportions slightly to give different models a slightly different shade of Sinai Grey. A short chapter in the book Israeli Military Vehicles 1948-1998 deals with this colour and details several colour mixes.

SCALE COLOUR
Applying the "full" strength colour of the real 1:1 scale prototype onto a 1/35 scale replica will look far too dark. Hence my suggestion for a straight out of the bottle colour as a starting point is Testors Modelmaster armour sand FS30277. This gives a very good representation in 1/35 scale of the real thing at scale viewing distances.

SCALE COLOUR PRINCIPLES
When you view an object at some distance, say 50 metres, the colour changes from that seen at two metres. This is because there are any number of particles in the air between your eye and the object being viewed. These particles include dust, water, smoke and such like. These particles tend to dull the colour.

To test this theory paint two squares of paper painted matt black. One card is 50x50mm and the other is 300x300mm. Place the larger card against a neutral background whilst holding the smaller one at arms length.  Now, walk backward away from the larger card until both cards appear to be the same size. You will notice that the colours of the card are no longer the same. The closer card will be closer to the original colour and more vibrant. The same effect is noticed when looking at panoramic views where the closer colours are more vibrant and the distant ones are more grey or indistinct.

The colour of a 1/35th scale model at one foot should be the same colour/shade as a real tank at 35 feet.