Apparently, this is the 25th article I’ve written this past year. As many of you know, I’m a retired pastor and biochemist; among my retirement hobbies is writing both fiction and poetry. I think the mental discipline of writing regular more serious posts for CC has been beneficial for my hobby writing as well. I seem to be building less and writing more. But there’s still no shortage of things to see.
Our editor Rich suggested I write another piece highlighting my use of colour. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this filled me with trepidation, but it did make me stop and think about perception. Do we all see the world in a slightly different way? What do others see that I don’t, and vice-versa?
I remember getting my first pair of glasses at eleven, and being amazed how sharp and clear everything was. Dad asked why I hadn’t said anything before about my eyes, and I replied something along the lines of how did I know sight was supposed to be different? I had nothing to compare it to. We only have one brain. We have nothing else to compare our perceptions to, and any attempt at comparison is filtered through our own perceptions. Follow that line of thought to its logical conclusion, and who’s to say anything is a misperception? Let’s not get into the murky waters of neurotypical perception versus neurodiverse. That way headaches lie…
Okay, I’ll put the philosopher away for today.
My photo files are becoming unmanageable (for me), so we’ll just go look through the sixties today. But given access to my files, your choice might be different. And I’ll give you a look into why I chose that colour.
I tend to avoid common colours, like white, black or red. They’re too predictable, too overused. Sometimes uncommon factory colours can be appealing. For many years Chevy offered Omaha Orange (Is Omaha really orange?), though as far as I know Holden never used it on Chevy trucks here. Or on anything else, for that matter. This might not be Omaha orange, but that was the inspiration.
Some colours just look right no matter what you put them on. Here’s a Nineties Ford Teal, combined with some other Nineties Ford colours. On a Chevy. Because it looks good. And a lighter blue accent on the side trim; this one’s an old Humbrol colour;
This time it’s a Chrysler/Mitsubishi colour. Mitsubishi bought out Chrysler here in ’80, so there was a degree of overlap, with the same colours used on both brands in the late seventies, with some beautiful shades used. And it’s on a Chevy because it looks good. I’m not pedantic. I’m sure Chevy offered some good colours, but this wasn’t one of them;
Aussie Ford purple on an American Ford. This was a kit of a famous drag car; rather than a maroon I went with a lighter purple metallic, XB Falcon Mulberry. And of course, that chrome molding had to contain a second colour, to match the roof. These Fairlanes always seemed to be two-toned back in the day;
Just love those ’65 Pontiacs. This is another Chrysler/Mitsubishi colour, with an ivory interior. White was too predictable, and would look ‘weak’. I can’t define what I mean; intuitively it just doesn’t look ‘right’ to me. It grabs my eye, and takes my attention away from the main colour. Even in the heyday of white interiors, they were usually more of a parchment or off-white, varying from brand to brand. In a model white would look like unpainted plastic. So I used ivory;
One of my ‘signature’ models, that people seem to remember. The interior inspiration came from a Galaxie seen in a Collectible Automobile feature. I matched it as closely as I could with my trusty old Humbrol enamels. I can’t recall where I got the brown;
Testors used to have a cool line of custom car colours, like this Inca Gold. Something in me said to go for a tan and brown interior. Another ‘signature’ model;
If you said this Buick looks like nineties Aussie Ford Everglade, you’d be right. It’s one of those colours that’s something of a ‘go-to’ for me. I try to avoid painting too many models the same colour (I do have hundreds to choose from), but some colours just plain look right, no matter what you put them on. Interior is in a lighter Ford blue from that era;
This ’66 Malibu was converted from a street machine kit, hence the SS hood. I used the colours from a neighbour’s similar-vintage Holden wagon, but added chrome window trim because it looked like it needed it;
This time I went factory. Dad’s last Falcon was this colour scheme. You probably couldn’t get a Fairlane GT with the green interior, but since when has that stopped me?
Generally blue and green don’t mix. But with a slightly greenish-blue you can get away with it. Unfortunately, the Nova’s body doesn’t show much of the interior colour;
For this ’66 Olds 442 I chose a conservative (muddy) brownish-gold, but threw in a maroon interior. It worked for Holden in 1966, so why not?
Purple, meet red. Rather a violent colour combination, but since purple is a mixture of blue and red it ought to work – says me!
A study in dark greens. This ’67 GTO is a terrible kit, with vague detail from worn-out molds, but it was a present from my son, so I gave it my best shot.
A brown Chrysler? Brown interior;
Toning the interior to the car body colour rather than contrasting it seemed to be a growing trend in the sixties;
Unless you went for a black or white interior. A white interior would have worked on this Charger, but I went with green to match the body colour. I think it’s more interesting this way;
These Cougars show the ‘usual suspects’; white and black interior on the yellow car, black on the green. In Australia any muscle car just had to have a black interior, regardless of how impractical it was in our climate. It’s all about image, y’know? Hey, it’s our old friend perception again!
As I was going through my photo files, I realized how many visually unexciting cars I was passing over. Maybe sometime I need to have a “Festival of the Unexceptional”, like that famed British show? Another day….
A collector of scale models for over 65 years, I am a 47 Vintage Rolls Canardly, ( Roll down one hill and Can ardly get up the next) most of mine are promos or die cast. But earlier built several kits. I fondly recall trying to transform a 60 DeSoto into a 61 DeSoto with limited success. Strange how certain Marques have few if any models available in scale. For example, I have a 1961 1-18 Imperial convertible, but can find a 61 LEBARON only in 1-43. As for color, I have been fortunate enough to have 3 61 DeSoto 1-18 in red, black and light green. I believe it was also offered in two tone yellow and black. Another way I have been able to enjoy favorite cars is by using sales brochures to create collages. Most decorate my garage, but 61 Imperial (featuring LEBARON) and 61 DeSoto are hanging in my bedroom so I can see them every day! COLOR is important in every way. LOL and thumbs 👍.
Yes, the whole issue of what is available in scale versus what isn’t can be an annoying one. Builders like myself often wish we had the variety of choice available in diecast models! Fortunately there are many resin kits from small companies to fill many of the gaps – at a price.
But yes, it is annoying when four companies produce (say) a 1966 VW Beetle, but nobody does an earlier-sixties one. Back in the day of Scale Auto Enthusiast magazine, they would often do comparison reviews of the various kits; I remember them doing comparos of 1957 Chevys and 1953-55 F100s.
And yes, colour rules!
I had the exact same experience when I got my first pair of glasses at around the same age. I had no idea what I was missing! Oh, and I’m a bit worried about that figurine in your final photo. Did he have a bit too much to drink? Or perhaps he was just overwhelmed by the sight of a Lincoln Futura and not one, but two Cougar Eliminators? Somebody get that guy a cup of coffee.
Ha! I just got myself another cup of coffee!
I always used to be so fixated on taking a picture of a model that I didn’t notice what was in the background – like figures which had fallen over. I’m usually more careful these days, but sometimes I still slip up. LIke photos in CC features or the Cohort – it’s always somebody else who notices details in the background.
There’s a story behind the two Eliminators. A Canadian friend messed up the paint on one (the green one; it was blue), but rather than strip the paint and redo it, he chose to give it to me. I was building one at the time, so it was no trouble to build ‘production-line’ style as my research was already done.
I saw a similar ’65 Galaxie years ago at a local car show. Just about everything here is up my alley, and I even built a couple of these a few decades (!) ago, including the ’65 Catalina and the ’66 Wildcat. Yours came out a lot better, but mine still look OK sitting on the shelf.
Nice selection!
That’s a beautiful Galaxie, Aaron, and points up a few details I missed. Thanks for the photo.
Decades are funny things; one day you look back and realise you’re older than you thought. The Catalina and Wildcat are comparatively recent builds (about ten-fifteen years old). Back in the sixties I wasn’t so neat; those models would be best viewed not on a shelf but from behind a brick wall!
I’ve said many times that I think your modeling skills are nonpareil. I’ve not seen one of yours yet that didn’t reflect care, patience and great craftsmanship.
But the “signature” line on display today (have I somehow overlooked prior reference to the same? Shame on me) are really the “stuff”, man. The right colors, in a bright metallic, applied sooooo smoothly and flawlessly to the right car. Really great.
Wow, thank you!
No, you haven’t missed reference to ‘signature’ models before. A group I’m in used the term for the models people think of when our name crops up, ones we’re known for, ones people remember. Sometimes it’s the subject matter, like my London Bus, that lodges it firmly in memory; other times it’s the colour, or sometimes it’s just hard to put a finger on.
There can be excellent models that sail under the radar so far as being memorable is concerned, they just lack the ‘gotcha factor’. I almost always prefer understatement, which makes that gold Riviera all the more memorable. And the brown Galaxie is a model people always seem to come back to and comment on whenever I show it online. The Galaxie is understated, but somehow memorable.
Please do the festival of the unexceptional. Love seeing your builds.
The purple and red reminded me of something I noticed in the 90’s. I had a fox marquis as my first car. Dark blue over dark blue. But I started to see them in the same color as mine but with a red interior. I wonder if those were end of the run builds using the last of the materials before they launched the Taurus
Thanks Clyde. I have so much more to show. I’ll get there. We’re still only halfway through my second display area. Today’s feature was just a break.
Sometimes it’s only when we get a car that we notice the slight differences between trim options, colour, or changes the factory made during a production run. Like a red interior in a dark blue Marquis. Was it late production, or had you only started noticing them? Doubtless somebody, somewhere, will know the answer as to what was going on there.
Beautiful assortment as always, Peter. And please don’t ever banish your inner philosopher from your essays. I come here for your thoughts as much as for your models.
I’ve always found it fascinating that others can identify a shade of paint with a particular manufacturer, as that’s a skill I’ve never possessed. Aside from being able to give a pretty good attempt at identifying “Ford Blue” under the hood, I can’t tell a Chevy red from a Nissan red.
I’d never know from looking at that ’67 GTO was from a subpar model kit. Looks well detailed the way you did it.
Looking forward as always to the next installment.
Thanks Joseph. I won’t banish the philosopher, just sort of keep him on a leash, along with the poet and the pedant. And try not to get their leashes tangled! Or let them get away from me. Strange things happen when the philosopher comes to the fore, as my writing group has found.
It’s not so much that I can identify a paint colour on a car, Joseph, more that I can (mostly) remember what paint I used on a particular model, whether it was Duplicolor, Tamiya, Testors or Humbrol. But with the advent of Tamiya’s tinted clears I can get differing effects which sort of mask the appearance of what I used under the tint. Most of the Dulpicolor paint I have is Ford or Chrysler colours, with some Holden. They had the most interesting colours though the seventies. In my stash, Japanese colours are uncommon enough (aside from seventies Datsun Safari Yellow) that I tend to remember using them. And I only have one Korean colour, Hyundai Lobelia (below).
On that GTO, a lot of the engraving was almost theoretical rather than sharp. I worked on accenting what I knew should be there. Things like door lines, windshield wipers, badge lettering, rain gutters, chrome strips – they’re some of the areas where old molds tend to show. Some companies (like Aoshima) periodically tidy up old molds before running them through the machine yet again, and print a disclaimer on the box side apologizing that the model isn’t up to current standards. Other just crank them through one more time, oblivious to what the resulting quality does for the company’s reputation. Sad.
Very, very impressive work Peter! I am thoroughly wowed. Iconic cars, in fantastic colour choices. The quality of your work, fully speaks for itself. As you are choosing and engaged in a build, you must dream, about having some of these examples in your own garage.
As I’ve said before, you really belonged in some car design/trim department! With an excellent grasp of recognizing great design, and applying some of their most flattering colours.
Thanks Daniel. With hindsight, I now realize I am too sensitive to have survived in a studio environment, so it’s just as well I never pursued it seriously. I don’t respond positively to domineering/strong personalities, due to unfortunate childhood experiences.
I’ll sometimes daydream about what it would have been like to have owned a particular car, and often make colour choices based on what I would like to have had. When a car was only available in certain colours my mental hackles rise, and I get a case of the “how dare yous?” followed quickly by the “what ifs?”. That’s when stuff like this happens. That’s also in part why I don’t model much past about 2010 – new cars just look too boring unless you paint for the shock factor. An S210 Toyota Crown would be white, silver, or black, and looks pretty ordinary. Paint it a nice bright metallic green (pretty ordinary fifty years earlier) and the design takes on a whole new aura. The design comes alive, as you notice lines and contours blanded out by the limited and oh-so-common colour palette. The eye doesn’t register the design as different, it’s just another silver sedan.
Maybe that’s why modern Mercs and BMWs have such shocking styling – it’s so people will notice them at all. Time to bring back die Farben, Herren!
Some beautiful work here Peter, I will put my usual Chrysler bias aside, for a moment, and select the Wildcat as the pick of this bunch.
On matching interior colors with the color of the car, I once saw a YouTube video of a 68 or 69 Dodge Coronet, Red with matching interior, at the time I thought it was the most beautiful car I had ever seen, until of course, I saw the next most beautiful car I had ever seen.
Another vote for the Festival of the Unexceptional here.
Thanks Jonco. I hadn’t consciously thought about what cars I was showing. There is perhaps an under-representation of Mopars, now that you mention your bias. I could have shown a metallic purple ’62 Dart, but we’ve seen that before. For some reason most of my sixties Mopars are fairly ordinary colours. There was that 300, and the green/white Charger, but yes, the Wildcat does take some beating.
A ’69 Coronet in red, now let me see… Will orange do? 🙂
It turns out I am an older fart than heretofore I knew but hence shall duly note, for I realize that as soon as a car color turns custom-ish, my rather large nose wrinkles reflexively (whilst not noting the irony that an old fart achieves the precise same upon others).
In proof of the foolishness of my staid (if not stale) attitude, that ’65 Poncho, non-factory, is utterly delightful, and Car of Today’s Show. Perhaps in a fading defence, I might add that the Inca Gold Riv achieves a rating at the other end of the scale, looking to these eyes rather too much like We think Your Horse Has Diabetes*, but there nonetheless minor points for imagination.
I got glasses at just four. I had to, because I woke up one day and found the world had doubled, without leaving me any clues as to which of anything to choose as real. (When that came to hospital chocolates during diagnosis, it was an especially cruel twist from nature, leaving me both with an unjustified love of certain relatives for their generosity and a concomitant but paradoxical mistrust of same when the second whole box was not part of reality, but I digress).
World needs more Petes in it, Pete, for more color amongst us, the better to replenish our souls with a bit of joy.
*Fellow makes whisky at home, rather proud of results: sends off to lab for confirmation: opens reply in high anticipation many months later, and it reads “Unfortunately, we think your horse has diabetes”.
Justy, that must have been quite the experience, suddenly seeing double and at such a young age. But how disappointing that you couldn’t get to eat that second lot of chocolates. I shall have to have a chocolate in Young Justy’s memory. Cheers! Or whatever you say for chocolate…
Sometimes it’s tricky to draw the line between a custom colour and one that’s just, um, nice but not factory-correct for a particular car. Okay, any metalflake like that Inca Gold is obviously custom, but I don’t draw lines; I colour between them. I have no qualms about correcting a factory colour chart by applying a colour they should have used, thus livening up a car’s styling. Remedial colouring. Like that green Crown above. The body contours are actually interesting, but the bland factory colours hide them. Who looks at one white car among a sea of white cars? One silver car in a sea of silver? Who looks long enough to start noticing details let alone subtleties? The eye is bored; it moves on, in search of something that stands out. Maybe an instinct bred in us from hunter-gatherer days?
You could look at this as remedial colour therapy, notably used (if not invented) by Jasper Fforde (q.v.), probably at one of his Fforde Ffiestas (groan, also q.v.!), which tells you something about his sense of humour. And mine.
Peter: I thought that the Galaxie was superb, but then I saw the Wildcat…if I hadn’t known that it was a model, I’d have almost thought it was a real car! Simply EXQUISITE!! Your pictures are such a feast for the eyes; and I, too, found out that I was extremely nearsighted in the sixth grade. Like you, I thought that everyone saw the world as I did! 🙂
Thank you.
Sometimes I just build a model, but other times the subject really grabs me and I go all-out for realism. Most of the cars in today’s group were ones that grabbed me; the Galaxie from my memory of occasionally seeing these big American Fords as a kid (ultra-pricey in Australia), and from memories of the swap-card album I had (still have somewhere) with a Galaxie card in it. The Buick, well, I saw a sixties Buick once as a kid, and was just overwhelmed by all the brightness inside and out. I tried to capture not so much what a Buick should look like as my impression of a Buick. Does that make it qualify as an impressionist model? Is there such a thing? Who cares! I’m just glad it brings delight when others see it.
Beautiful work! I could gaze at these all day.
Thanks Lee. Plenty more coming up in ’25. Just wait till I get around to 1971… I’ll have to do a separate story just for the Mopars!
The Inca Gold (under that name and in that exact color) appeared IRL on a special edition PT Cruiser. It is a tricky color to find a good car home for, but the Riv does it justice. There is a unique one–year 1966 Ford color called “emberglow”, sort of a smoky metallic copper color. I wonder if it is possible to have a small amount made up for a scale model kit.
Along those lines, is it possible to use car touch-up paint in aerosol form to paint scale models, or is the paint too thick?
Thanks Dutch. Yes, there seems to be some kind of relationship between shape and a suitable colour – maybe someone who has studied design theory could explain; I’m just feeling my way here by instinct. Inca Gold is hard to find the ‘right’ shape for outside of hot rods, and I don’t build too many of those. But the Riv has the ‘right’ blend of lightly curved surfaces with sharp creases that would seem to suit almost any colour. A friend painted one in pale pink mica with a white roof, and it looks absolutely lovely. It would never have occurred to me, but having seen his I’m wondering ‘Why not?’
Some colour experiments don’t quite turn out as planned. Or I think a model looks nice after I’ve finished it, but then a couple of years down the track I think ‘Actually no, that doesn’t work.’
I think Emberglo turned up down under as Copper Bronze, and was a staple of our Ford lineup in the early to mid seventies. If not the same colour, it’s very similar.
Response part 2. (Sorry, missed the second para) Yes, I’ve used car touch up paint a lot, more so in the past than now. It require a different technique to regular hobby paints, as it has a ‘hotter’ solvent base which requires a good quality primer so it won’t attack the plastic and give you a crinkly finish – which is a real nuisance to try and sand out. Also the touch-up aerosol cans spray at a higher pressure which can result in a lumpy finish if you’re not careful; you need to ‘mist’ the paint on over five or six very light coats rather than try to cover it all in two coats like you can with (say) Tamiya. I’ll cover this in more detail in a future story.
Thank you again Peter. A very cheerful part of your collection and studio, with your writing, are much appreciated on a chilly winter night!
And thank you Daniel, on this balmy 21C evening! Birdsong (mostly corella screeching, but also budgerigars and quail), the gentle trickle of falling water, and about an hour till sundown. I’m looking forward to next year’s writing, have the first installment ready to go, and have been thinking about the second.
Here’s the studio at the moment. The lift is a new addition I built up last week. The Skyline sedan on it was finished since my last story. The Skyline racer to the left needs the missing decals applied; it’s been stalled for five years, I knew they were here somewhere! And the Hudson? It’s a resin body from some thirty years ago that’s being massaged (VERY carefully, with much holding of breath) to fit the chassis from a Moebius Hudson kit (new in the last ten years). Things don’t quite line up, some body details are a bit off (one tail light’s higher than the other), but we’re getting there.
I love the color varieties! That Testors Inca Gold looks much like a color of the same name Chrysler offered in the early to mid 1970’s, then brought back as a retro color on the PT Cruiser.
The one problem with modern metallics on scale models is that today’s metallic paints really make those metal flakes big and prominent. It works really well on full sized cars, but the model makes the metallic flecks really look huge.
The color you used on the 65 Buick looks very much like a color GM offered that year. Relatives had a 65 Pontiac painted that shade, and it looked really nice.
Thanks JPC. That’s a very good point on the size of the metallic particles sometimes being out of scale for use on a model. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter; other times the difference really strikes you.
That Buick above was painted in a nineties colour, and the metallic particles aren’t obviously out of scale. It’s a colour which pretty much said “Luxury Car” back in 1965, when most car colours tended to be lighter and something like black was a special order, often not even shown but mentioned in the fine print as “also available”.
Fortunately there is such a wide variety of colours available in hobby paints these days that I rarely resort to modern touch up paints; I’m gradually using up the cans I have ‘in stock’.
The Inca Gold looks like the colour that Matchbox used on their Opel Diplomat. And maybe Lucozade too…
https://www.thenostalgiashop.co.uk/products/lucozade-glucose-drink-original-advert-1952-ref-ad300954
Very similar, Bernard. From memory I think that Opel wasn’t quite so bright. It was an interesting colour for Matchbox to have chosen. Did the Diplomat even come in gold? I don’t recall them using that colour before.
As a side note, sometimes colours need to be adjusted to give the right effect in scale. Many’s the time I’ve used touch-up paint only to find the factory colour doesn’t look right on a 1/25 subject. I’ve heard of some guys adjusting the factory formula to give the correct visual effect, but I just grin and bear it. It’s a model, not a museum replica!
Scaling colour is one of those tricky areas. Lighten black and you get grey. Then again a black car in a monochrome photo is actually going to be grey, isn’t it? I have a 1:76 Victor 101 I painted in Duplicolor Cypress Green and it does, I admit, almost look black under indoor lights, but alright in strong sunlight (Not much of that this time of year here!)
I started wearing glasses in my first year of high school, and as others have already said, it was a revelation. I should have clued in much earlier, as I have an older brother who was extremely short sighted and he started wearing glasses at a very young age. The family story is that my mother was taking us to visit family friends by walking from the subway. My brother was just learning to read and my mother asked him what a street sign said. His reply was what sign? He got glasses soon after that.
I did want to comment on the perception of colour. I was probably about 10 when I found out I was colour blind. I had painted a picture and given a boy green hair, thinking I had used brown paint. I have the most common type of colour blindness, called red-green. It took me a long to realize that the name does not describe the effects and it is a lot more complicated than that.
When I got my drivers licence I said I was colour blind, but they gave me a test showing traffic lights and I could tell them apart, so it was not marked on my licence.
Over time I have realized it is much more subtle. Red is not a bright colour to me. A bright red cardinal sitting in a tree stands out to my wife. When she points it out I can see it, and it looks red, but it does not stand out to me.
It does not affect me much in daily life. The minor things include that I cannot distinguish:
ripe bananas from green, cooked beef from raw beef or a sunburn from a tan. On the plus side I cannot tell a green lawn from a brown one, so it saves me from watering.
On a more serious note, in an urban setting at night I cannot distinguish between a green traffic light and a white street light, so when it turns amber it can be a bit of a surprise.
I had a daily class in oral French starting in grade 3. I did OK, but I remember having trouble learning the names of some colours. It was only much later that I realized it was because I could not distinguish the colours. Again, assuming our perception is the same as everyone else. I suspect my problem was with purple. Purple and its variations look like blue to me. I once had a light nylon jacket that I wore for running for several years. It was only after it wore out, and I mentioned my old blue jacket that I found out that it was purple, not blue. I think this is because I don’t see the red that goes with the blue to make purple. Pink is also a weak point, as I see it as beige.
One result of this is that I find I ignore colour, even when I can tell what it is. I can remember the details of cars I have seen, but often not the colour. Only if it was light or dark. I guess I was wrong often enough to subconsciously ignore the colour.
It might also be the reason I have owned 2 orange cars. Orange is a colour I have no problem with, and it is the brightest colour to me.
Mike, I laughed at your comment about watering! Very topical, since it’s summer here, and we’ve just come off a run of days in the mid 30s. We just let the grass go in summer, knowing it’ll come back. with the autumn rains. Town water costs too much unless we run down the rainwater tanks. And we need that for drinking and cooking.
You make an excellent point about colour perception. My wife and daughter often correct me about what I see as purple (they say it’s blue) and sometimes other colours too. The scientist in me (yeah, he’s still back there somewhere!) wants to have a definitive light-wavelength cutoff point between similar colours – blue is 450-495nm, purple is below that – but that would be no help as it comes down to how the eye perceives it. Without an internationally-accepted Standard Eye Perception (that’s the SF writer in me – or is there such a thing?), who’s to say what’s right or ‘wrong’? All we can do is try and fit in with those around us who design those traffic lights, and hope they know what they’re doing.
I missed this the first time around, and I took my time with it this time. Stating the obvious, color really is a key component of your modeling. Your choices really make these models pop; it’s refreshing to see what they do for the various cars. I continue to be in awe of your skills and creativity.
Thanks Paul. 2025 will be… interesting.
Choosing colours isn’t easy. Too conservative and who’ll give it a second look? And I’d be bored; I just can’t get enthusiatic about black/white/red/silver. Too outrageous and it’ll look like a toy. And it can be a fine line between a toy and a model; some would say models are toys. Semantics? Perception? Let’s not go there.
I’ve almost always aimed for ultra-realism. Or as ultra as I can do it.
I don’t always get colours right. This Nissan Gloria Y33 looked all right in my mind’s eye, but isn’t quite right now that I see it in 3D. I sat it on 20s, but it still doesn’t look ‘right’, not even as a modified car. It might work as the base colour for an Itasha car (a Japanese anime-influenced art car style), but I’m not going there, I tried, but the colour just seemingly isn’t a good fit for the shape. It would work beautifully on a late-forties to mid-fifties car, but just doesn’t translate to a late-nineties Gloria.