French Five-Color Camouflage

In early 1918 the French replaced their "yellow period" color standard with a five-color camouflage scheme, and you can frequently find this scheme on French planes whether they're flown by natives or allies. The five colors are usually described as a dark green, a light green, a chestnut brown, a beige, and underside light yellow, though sometimes a light blue was used in place of the underside yellow, and technically there was some black thrown in.

The following diagram shows a 1917-model SPAD 13 in five-color camouflage. The followup posts will cover each of these five colors, except for the underside colors, which are (or will be) covered elsewhere. As always, there was quite a bit of variance in the colors and even in the patterns. SPAD sent out patterns for their planes, but it was still up to each manufacturer to modify and adapt the sketches to their production machines.