Black and red stork

[SCMc]

http://www.storks.cwc.net/guy/n17.html has a profile of Guynemer's Nieu. 17, N-1531, stating that this is one of the earliest appearances of the stork insignia. The stork is black with red flight feathers, beak and legs.

Is there any evidence for or against these colors?

Steve

[gilles]

Hello!

There are several interpretations of the colors of this stork. For instance in the Osprey books (Nieuport aces andGC12 Les Cigognes), this stork is painted red body and blue beak and feathers.

What is sure is the stork is definitely painted with 2 different colors.
The top image of your link shows two different tones on the stork (there are cleaner pictures of N1531 where this is more obvious, there's also a picture of René Dorme's N1720 "père Dorme 3" with the same stork)
Notice the top wing cockade behind Guynemer's legs, the red outer ring is not very dark, the body of the stork is darker (as is the numeral "2", not visible on this photo)
On another hand, it is possible that the factory painted cockade and the unit painted insignia did not use the same shade of red



HTH

Gilles

[SCMc]

Gilles,

Thanks for another reply. I could see the difference in shade, but I wasn't sure how much might be due to the space between the feathers.

What I have been been using so for is red most for early planes based on Guynemer's SPAD in Paris, and white and black for SPAD XIII's.



I can see looking at my results below, that the plummage is not very different than the body, though part of this may be the gaps between feathers being too narrow.



I hope DeltaK does not mind me posting the results of my modifying his patch?