Using an original British Army paint formula and surviving uniform evidence to rebuild the colours of Mark V tank №.9435
Colourizing an archival photograph should not be an exercise in simply making a black-and-white image look plausible. The objective is to reconstruct a believable colour environment from evidence: the date, location, unit, surviving material culture, contemporary specifications and, where available, original paint formulations. The photograph of Mark V tank №.9435, tactical number J18, provides an unusually good opportunity to do exactly that.
The original photograph was taken by official war photographer David McLellan near Albert, France, on 9 August 1918, during the Battle of Amiens. The archival caption identifies the soldier not as an officer but as a Corporal of the Tank Corps, standing beside the camouflaged Mark V J18 of the 10th Battalion, Tank Corps. The vehicle had been concealed beneath cut corn to reduce its visibility from the air. Wikimedia Commons
Specialist tank records identify J18 as serial №.9435, a Mark V Composite serving with B Company, 10th Battalion. The tank had already been in action on 8 August, the opening day of Amiens, immediately before McLellan photographed it. Google Sites
That context matters because the photograph is not depicting a freshly painted museum vehicle. It shows an operational fighting machine in the field: dirty, stained, abraded and partially concealed beneath vegetation. The colourization therefore needed two separate layers of interpretation—the original manufactured colours and everything that active service subsequently did to them.
The Tank: British Service Brown
The strongest starting point for the armour is not a modern modeller’s interpretation of “WWI brown”, but a documented British Army paint formulation.
The Handbook for Military Artificers, published before and during the First World War, contains a formula for British Service Colour. The recipe reproduced in the KSM research material is:
- Ground white lead — 38 lb
- Stone ochre — 26 lb 8 oz
- Burnt Turkey umber — 9 lb 8 oz
- Ground lamp black — 12 oz
- Prussian blue — 12 oz
- Patent driers — 9 lb 8 oz
- Raw linseed oil — 2 gallons 1 quart
- Turpentine — 3½ quarts
The batch produced approximately 1 cwt — 50.8 kg — of paint. The formula is attributed to the 1910 and 1915 editions of the Handbook for Military Artificers. The 1915 handbook itself was an official HMSO publication prepared by the Ordnance College. Kawartha Scale Modellers
The recipe is particularly revealing because it tells us far more about the paint’s likely appearance than a modern colour name does.
White lead and stone ochre dominate the pigment mass. Burnt umber supplies the brown component, while comparatively tiny quantities of lamp black and Prussian blue suppress brightness and neutralize the strong yellow-orange character of the ochre. The result should therefore not be interpreted as a straightforward chocolate brown, nor should it become the greenish Olive Drab familiar from later American vehicles.
It is better understood as a muted ochre–umber brown carrying a restrained cool or slightly greenish undertone.
That distinction drove the correction of J18.
The first colourization pushed the tank too far toward grey-olive. It was visually plausible military camouflage, but the armour began to resemble a later twentieth-century olive drab. Returning to the actual pigment recipe showed why it needed more warmth. The final interpretation therefore shifts the underlying paint toward earthy brown, ochre, and umber, while letting Prussian blue and lamp black keep it from becoming orange or excessively warm.
The distinction is subtle but important.
A Recipe Is Not a Modern Colour Standard
The surviving formula does not give us an exact digital RGB value for Service Colour.
Period pigments varied. White lead, natural ochres and umbers were not modern spectrophotometrically controlled colourants. Pigment strength depended upon source and processing; the oil medium itself affected the appearance; film thickness altered opacity; and ageing, oxidation, sunlight, dirt and moisture changed the surface after application.
Consequently, the purpose of the original recipe is not to manufacture a falsely precise computer swatch. It establishes the direction and balance of the colour.
That evidence strongly supports brown and ochre as the foundation, with black and blue acting as chromatic brakes. Contemporary discussions of the surviving formula similarly describe Service Colour as occupying the region between brown and green rather than being a clean green paint. Britmodeller
For archival colourization, that is substantially more useful than selecting a modern bottle of paint simply because its label says “WWI British”.
Service Brown Beneath Operational Weathering
J18’s visible colour is not merely Service Brown.
The armour is covered by the accumulated optical effects of combat service: dried earth, wet staining, dust, grime, scratches, handling and vertical water tracks. These effects were deliberately allowed to modify the colour without replacing it.
The broad plates therefore retain a recognizable brown-ochre foundation while darker umber staining develops around rivets, joints and lower surfaces. Dust and dried mud introduce lighter earth tones. Rain and repeated wetting create vertical variation. The 6-pounder mounting, rivets, track components and heavily handled areas become locally darker.
This approach is important because weathering should not be mistaken for camouflage colour.
A mud-covered brown vehicle can easily appear grey, olive or almost black in a monochrome photograph. The original greyscale image records luminance, not recoverable chromatic information. Dark tonal areas do not tell us automatically whether the underlying material was green, brown, blue or red. Historical information must supply that missing dimension.
The Corporal: British Khaki Service Dress
The soldier required a completely different colour problem.
British Service Dress had standardized khaki for field use before the First World War. The National Army Museum records that khaki Service Dress for officers and men was formalized in 1902, and by 1914 British troops were being issued the 1902 Pattern Service Dress tunic and trousers in dark khaki shades. Surviving garments are described as khaki serge or wool, rather than the light sandy cotton colour now commonly associated with the word khaki. National Army Museum Collection
That distinction became essential in the colourization.
The Corporal’s tunic and trousers should read as khaki-drab wool: a subdued brownish olive rather than beige. The colour is intentionally restrained, with enough green-grey influence to differentiate the cloth from the warmer Service Brown of the tank.
This creates an important visual separation:
the tank is an ochre–umber brown; the uniform is a cooler brown-olive khaki.
They belong to the same earthy military palette without becoming the same colour.
The difference is also supported by material. Wool serge scatters light differently from painted steel. Even two surfaces with superficially similar colour coordinates would not photograph identically. The coarse wool uniform has a soft, diffuse appearance; painted armour has harder highlights and much stronger localized contrast around rivets, scratches and wet staining.
Webbing and Equipment
The equipment cannot simply be painted with the same khaki used for the uniform.
Canvas, webbing and cloth equipment had different fibres, dyes, treatments, wear patterns and exposure histories. The chest-carried equipment in the photograph therefore receives a somewhat lighter, yellower khaki-canvas treatment, providing another small but important separation from the wool tunic.
The principle is the same one that applies when painting a scale figure: calling five different materials “khaki” and applying one colour to all of them destroys much of the visual information.
Khaki wool, canvas equipment, painted steel and Service Brown armour may all occupy neighbouring areas of an earth-colour palette, but they should remain distinguishable.
The Brodie Helmet
The steel helmet presents yet another surface.
It should not look like khaki wool painted onto metal. The finish is darker and flatter, with a subdued brown-green/khaki character and the harder specular response of painted steel. Dirt, surface texture and wear further break up what would otherwise be a simple uniform colour.
Keeping the helmet slightly darker than the tunic also helps preserve the tonal hierarchy visible in McLellan’s original photograph.
Corn, Mud and the Battlefield Environment
The vegetation covering J18 was not decorative scenery. According to the archival description, the tank was concealed in a cornfield during the Battle of Amiens. Wikimedia Commons
The dried material was therefore reconstructed using restrained straw, tan and faded ochre hues rather than bright yellow. This is particularly important because saturated vegetation would immediately overwhelm the muted wartime palette.
The ground follows the same logic. Western Front earth is not rendered as a single generic brown. Damp soil, dry exposed earth, dead vegetation and timber debris all receive slightly different values and temperatures.
These environmental colours also help explain why Service Brown was effective. Against earth, dead vegetation and shadow, the combination of ochre, umber and neutralizing pigments belongs naturally to the landscape.
Why the Soldier and Tank Must Not Match
One of the most significant corrections made during development concerned colour separation.
An early version placed both the uniform and tank within such a narrow brown-green range that the Corporal almost visually merged with the vehicle. Historically related colours had inadvertently become identical-looking colours.
The correction was not to make either object artificially colourful. Instead, their chromatic biases were separated.
The tank moved warmer toward Service Brown: ochre, umber and restrained brown.
The uniform remained cooler: brownish khaki with an olive-drab cast.
The web equipment moved slightly lighter and yellower.
The helmet became darker and more neutral.
The result remains subdued, but the individual materials can now be read immediately.
This is precisely the kind of distinction that a monochrome source photograph cannot provide on its own.
Colourization Without Rewriting the Photograph
There is another important principle behind this reconstruction: colourization should not become image generation.
The historical information in McLellan’s photograph remains the primary evidence. Rivet positions, armour plates, sponson geometry, damage, equipment, vegetation, markings and the Corporal’s appearance should remain where the camera recorded them.
The objective is not to create a more dramatic Mark V photograph.
It is to make this photograph readable in colour.
That distinction becomes increasingly important as modern image tools become capable of convincingly inventing missing detail. A visually attractive addition may still be historically false. Archival colourization therefore requires restraint: repair obvious image degradation where necessary, improve tonal separation where justified, but do not casually redesign the subject.
№.9435 — More Than an Anonymous Mark V
The serial identification makes this photograph particularly valuable.
Compiled Mark V records identify 9435 as J18 of B Company, 10th Battalion Tank Corps, commanded during the 8 August Amiens fighting by Sgt Raffe’s crew. The surviving battle-history summary describes J18 becoming disoriented in the morning mist, encountering heavy machine-gun fire and running over several machine-gun positions before eventually rallying under shellfire. On the following day, McLellan photographed the tank under its improvised corn camouflage. Sierra Toy Soldier Company
The colourization therefore restores colour not to an anonymous museum subject, but to a machine photographed between operations during one of the decisive battles of 1918.
That makes restraint even more important.
What We Know — and What We Do Not
Responsible archival colourization needs to distinguish documentary evidence from reconstruction.
We know the photograph’s date, photographer, general location, unit and tactical identity from the surviving archival information. We have a contemporary British Army formula for Service Colour. We have surviving British Service Dress garments and museum documentation describing their materials and khaki appearance. Wikimedia Commons
What we do not possess is an untouched paint chip removed from J18 on 9 August 1918 and measured under controlled modern lighting.
Accordingly, the colourization should not be presented as absolute proof of precisely what every surface looked like.
It is better described as an evidence-based reconstruction.
That is a stronger position, not a weaker one. Historical credibility does not come from pretending uncertainty does not exist. It comes from identifying the uncertainty and then making the most defensible choice the available evidence permits.
🧰 TechNote: Reading the Service Brown Formula
The pigment proportions explain why British WWI Service Colour should not automatically be painted green.
Ignoring the vehicle for a moment and looking only at the solid pigments, white lead and ochre constitute the overwhelming majority of the mixture, with burnt umber forming the principal dark earth pigment. Lamp black and Prussian blue are present only in small quantities. Kawartha Scale Modellers
Their effect, however, can be disproportionately strong. Prussian blue is a powerful pigment; combined with yellow ochre it can introduce a muted green tendency, while lamp black reduces saturation and value.
This produces exactly the sort of difficult colour commonly encountered in historical military finishes: a colour that may appear brown in one light, brown-green in another, and almost grey beneath dirt and weathering.
That is why the recipe—not a modern colour name—provides the better guide.
Restoring Colour, Not Replacing History
The finished colourization of Mark V №.9435, J18 rests on three primary colour relationships: documented British Service Brown on the tank, brown-olive khaki Service Dress on the Corporal, and differentiated khaki/canvas/painted-steel colours across his equipment.
The resulting image remains deliberately restrained.
There are no brilliant military greens, no chocolate-brown tank, no bright tan uniform and no cinematic orange battlefield treatment. Instead, ochre, umber, khaki, earth and faded vegetation occupy a closely related but carefully separated palette.
That is the objective of responsible archival colourization.
The colour should help us understand the photograph—not compete with it.
