French Five-Color Camouflage

In October 1917, 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. Below is covered each of the four topside colors, with black needing no explanation and French Light Yellow covered elsewhere. As always, there was quite a bit of variance in the colors and even in the patterns, and several sample colors from actual fabric or paints are presented below. 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.