Gaz 55 Ambulance - Part 6

The Great Green Debate (Still Haunts Me...)
Time to put paint to plastic. I'm a little nervous about this as I feel very rusty, and my airbrush breaking did not help the situation (back to rattle cans and brush painting for the foreseeable future).

This next stage in my Gaz 55 project is to lay down the main colour block, or base coats. I'd picked my preferred colour scheme and had originally intended to airbrush on a coat of Vallejo's Model Air 'Russian Green', but with no airbrush, I had to revert to Humbrol's 'Matt Light Olive' Acrylic Spray can for the basic green coat.

This has pros and cons, proper 'Russian Green' is usually considered to be a deeper, richer green, as can be seen from my YAG 6 Heavy Truck model...

Vallejo's 'Russian Green' was used on this truck, it has nice rich yellow tones,
and seems like a deep and warm green.

But, Humbol's 'Light Olive' is a 'bluer' medium olive which can be modulated to take on a darker tone, once weathered, as in this example...

Humbrol's 'Light Olive' is a versatile generic olive that can be modified to take
on different tones of green with washes or filters. But, basically, it does have
a slightly colder cast to it. I also 'dirtied' this Zis-6 up a bit!

When I did my research for Finnish war-time trucks, my main point of reference was this photo of a very rare museum example...

Again, here, I used Humbrol's 'Light Olive' but then modulated it with the
previous reference photo in mind.

You be the judge of which green paint - 'Russian Green or 'Light Olive' - is closer to this original example. Sadly, there just aren't enough original example of Finnish military colour schemes left to be definitive about this, and there is as much a debate about Finnish colours as there is with those other great modelling controversies of what constitutes 'Olive Drab' or, indeed, what 'Russian Green' is.

My preference leans toward the 'Light Olive' approach, and with this in mind, I was quite happy with how my Gaz 55 came out after it's base coats were added...

The black and green two-tone scheme I am going for an original Soviet scheme, the Gaz being a vehicle that was 'liberated' from its previous owners by the Finns. So, I may modulate this olive green to be a bit darker, similar to the Zis-6 truck example that I picture above. Or, I may try a bit of filtering with a 'yellow' to create a deeper 'Russian Green' effect...We shall see...