Linden Hill Imports is starting to carry the new Russian AKAN brand of acrylic hobby paints. These are primarily aircraft colors. However, AKAN does a bottle of the standard Soviet army WWII 4BO dark green. The bottles are small (a bit bigger than old-fashioned Testor's bottles).

I tried out the 4BO and it seems to airbrush well and has good coverage.

The AKAN WWII paints are supposed to have been matched against one of the rare surviving copies of the 1948 Paint Album of the Paint Directorate of the MKhP. The color is about what would be expected, a dark olive green. The color does not exactly match the APG color swatches taken from the two tanks delivered from the USSR during the war(~FS 34052), nor do they precisely match color samples taken by the Parola museum in Finland (~FS 24098). The AKAN color is a bit browner. A rough match is something near FS 34098.

Fo anyone interested in buying these paints:

http://www.lindenhillimports.com/

Do we have any idea how many factory's are producing 4BO during the Great Patriotic War? And more to the point if more than one how regular is the colour produced?

Just wondering what Soviet paint quality control of the era is like!

Instrumentation would have been the same as anywhere else...either a common comparison colorimeter like the Lovibond (pretty common by then) or simple daylight (both on the fly methods), neither of which can generate any permanent data.  Spectophotometry (which can generate permanent data & doesn't rely on a comparison color standard) was still getting wrinkles ironed out during the war & was barely implemented by war's end (& was a very US kind of technology), so you can forget that

So key to both methods is a color standard for comparison, and one can infer from the US experience that this could have been a cause of color drift of tank color.  In the US for example, a ministry would issue a color standard...take prewar OD22 for example.  The official standard was about the size of a thumbnail, and limited in quantity.  Paint companies couldn't use that for everyday color comparison...they had to produce larger standards to work with, and even more to send to subcontractors.  With the color comparison technolgies mentioned above, one stands the chance of introducing color drift with every new batch of color standards produced.  And ingredients matter too.  Color comparison is made under a very specific set of lighting & geometry to get a pass for production.  If you have different ingredients (pigments for example) the chances are more likely than not that metamerism will arise, which means that the color may pass under one set of lighting and/or geometry, but will not match under all the others (to infinity).  However, being that specs usually call for only one lighting/geometry, metamerism is pretty much a given, which means that a set of tanks from one factory may look like another set from another factory when viewed from a particular angle, but look different when viewed from many other angles. 

So to answer this it would help to find if USSR pigment mines were in the overrun territories or not, and were the comparion color standards made one time at one place, or many times at many places as in the US

Thankyou Steve, I am hoping that you will to do a book on Russian colours soon!

4BO dark green, whitewash and possibly some tan/brown shade which saw some limited use.

There is an english language text from Armada, sadly long OOP, which covers this subject quite well. There was some usage of camo patterns here & there but overall, RPPK stuck to the 'KISS' principle: paint it green. When the world turns white, paint the tank white.
The book title was along the line of "Camoflage of the Tanks of the Soviet Army During WW2"



Borrow money from pessimists -- they don't expect it back.
S.Wright

1) In fact, AKAN not a new brand.
2) 4BO have various changes from 1935 to 1952. As a example, sample of 1941 dated 4BO: