Aliens Dropship Paint scheme

[galacticaactual]

Hi!

I'm finally going to start the Aliens Dropship I've had sitting in my to do pile for about 15 years.

Can anyone suggest a paints cheme? In most shots it looks green but I've also heard that it is a brown colour?

I was thinking of using an olive drab colour. What colour have most people used?

Thanks

nick

[southwestforests]

I was thinking of using an olive drab colour.

Found this, where the thought is similar, http://www.starshipmodeler.com/other/gb_drop.htm

Color: The model is a forest green when it comes out of the box. If you want to make it more accurate, I would suggest a olive-drab paint scheme. This is the same color of the one in the movie.

[Zubie]

Not by accident the dropship is meant to evoke US Vietnam helicopter schemes...hence olive drab. Olive drab does have a brownish hue to it, or at the very least can have that hue. Interesting short thread on what exactly is Olive Drab in the field, but then again this was a prop. I would suspect it would most like have been a standard available "olive drab" circa mid 80s.

Pantone OD ▉▉▉▉▉▉, actually more towards olive, and fairly light
Bizarrely I can't seem to find the RGB for FS 34087 so I can't do a strict comparison to the paint refs
Tamiya XF-62 ▉▉▉▉▉▉ IPMS stockholm seems to like this as out of the bottle od), darker than pantone, less blue
Vallejo 70.887 OD, not entirely sure, around ▉▉▉▉▉▉ or ▉▉▉▉▉▉ lighter but more grey (RGB levels closer)

In order
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[Bellerophon]

The "brown color" you have heard of is the discontinued Humbrol 170 "Brown Bess, " or MC6 in their catalog when the movie was made. It's not exactly brown. It's like olive but with some red added to make it less green. I think if you showed it to different people, you would get different answers to what color it is, especially under different lighting.

It was used on props, but not sure about miniatures.

[southwestforests]

There was a 4 door Toyota Corolla my parents had in 1970s which appeared more greenish or brownish as lighting varied.
A fascinating hue.
Want to say the original intent seemed to have been looking to be brown-ish.

[Zubie]

The "brown color" you have heard of is the discontinued Humbrol 170 "Brown Bess, " or MC6 in their catalog when the movie was made. It's not exactly brown. It's like olive but with some red added to make it less green. I think if you showed it to different people, you would get different answers to what color it is, especially under different lighting.

It was used on props, but not sure about miniatures.

Well, the rpf does mention HU170 brown bess, but it must be for the miniatures, and only some close automotive or even canned paint for the full-size props. On the other hand, it appears to be very dark. Another site mentions that a close ref would be:
Vallejo 874 ▉▉▉▉▉▉, which per encycolorpedia 23.53% red, 20.39% green and 19.22% blue.
Vallejo 877 ▉▉▉▉▉▉, which is rated as 24.31% red, 26.67% green and 26.67% blue. Note this last one is one I referenced earlier as OD...finally found the entry for it rather than the previous which I picked from online color examples.
Both these shades are fairly dark and fairly grey (grey is when %R=%G=%B). In fact someone mentioned that Humbrol 10 was the nearest to the discontinued Humbrol 170
Humbrol 10 ▉▉▉▉▉▉ , 24.31% red, 22.75% green and 22.35% blue. Less green and more grey (RGB nearly match)

In general, it might be a case that the dark appearance is offset by studio lighting, thus the debate. Having looked at some shots of the model while being shot, and it doesn't look as dark as those shades. Of course, in the film almost all the scenes are shot in the bluish fluorescent hangar scene or in planet night which is dark and bluish.

For comparison again,
Pantone OD ▉▉▉▉▉▉, 46.67% red, 45.1% green and 32.16% blue, fairly light but what it "looks like"
Tamiya XF-62 ▉▉▉▉▉▉ 25.1% red, 29.02% green and 7.45% blue

I can't help but think that when Cameron and the modelmakers were working on this

They had stuff like this in mind

...probably that yellow kodak bias.

[blakeh1]

The color is definitely a weird one, and the general consensus seems to be "Brown Bess" but even within paint companies, the actual color of Brown Bess has changed over the years

The filming model to me looks more like brown with a bit of olive drab, favoring the brown side of the spectrum

I think on screen it looks more green due to the filters used on the film?

Kind of like Han Solo's ESB Hoth jacket being Brown in real life, but looking and being mistaken for Blue on screen and in certain lighting/filters

I have some higher res versions plus addition ref pictures of the large Dropship prop if you are interested
Seems I could only find small copies of these as they may have been taken down?
I would post them here, but I do not have them hosted on line, however, I can send them via email if needed

the larger model





and the smaller stop motion one

[jpolacchi]

I'd say its a military green/drab, or olive drab/brown drab color and who knows if they didn't use more than one color(change it in between painting it) or due to weathering changes the color entirely, plus there's all the blue screen film, lighting, whatever else they used for cinemaphotography.

[Bellerophon]

Zubie, I think you're right about Cameron going for a Vietnam War vibe (foreshadowing about all that military might, as Newt says, "It won't make any difference"). It's great visual storytelling, like Ridley Scott does: he doesn't hit us over the head with it, and probably very few consciously noticed it like you did, but it colors how you see these Colonial Marines. He uses a look the audience associates with a military that can't imagine it's about to lose for the first time.

All the above color research (thanks Zubie & Blakeh1) is really helpful for getting the gist of how the color should look. No point fretting over it, though: there's no one right answer when there was a full-size set piece and a couple miniatures, photographed with different cameras and film under different lighting, and the photos are viewed with varying color reproduction, and you can aim for the onscreen appearance, one of the actual things that were filmed, how you see the in-universe real thing, or whatever polish your imagination puts on it. But identifying colors can be a fun rabbit hole (the colors of the TOS Klingon battlecruiser comes to mind).

[dizzyfugu]

When I built one many moons ago I gave it an overall US-style Olive drab paint scheme, using Tamiya's XF-62 (the WWII USAAF tone), plus some weathering, and it looked very good (and similar to the model above). But other schemes would certainly be plausible, too, e.g. overall Gunship Grey (FS 36118) or a light grey low-viz scheme?