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Description
I made a little color chart for a few variations of White Star Buff ages ago (you can see that here ). However, I felt like it was time for an upgrade - while my old chart was fine, it relied very heavily on the explanations in the description, so I figured I should make a version that, while still better with the description, can be interpreted just fine without it too. That way it’s easier for people to use!

The three colors on top are the same ones I focused on in my old chart. I created some simple light and shadow shades for the yellow and pink colors as well. They come from these articles:

White Star Buff: The case for more than one formulation of the color

White Star Buff: Weighing the Evidence

Some of the light and shadow shades for the “Ken Marschall color” come from Mike Brady’s work, which can be found here .

These are the source photos for the Nomadic section:

1

2

3

4

5

These are the source photos for the 1997 set section:

1 (I also used this image in my last WSB chart)

2

3

4

I also took color samples from various Shaw, Savill, and Albion Line ships. This is because the author of one of the above mentioned articles based their color formula on these ships’ livery, so I wanted to make my own comparison. None of my results were remotely similar to the yellow shown in that article; like with Nomadic - and thus presumably other ships with buff funnels - the color as a whole looks yellowish, but when it’s broken down into its component parts it appears brown. I don’t know why this happens, but it was a recurring theme throughout the research I did for this. Note also that the photos I used here were taken between the 1950s and the 1970s, and color photography was different then; pigments also degrade over time, so the photos used may not be true to life.
Anyway, these are the ships and photos I used in this section:
New Australia
Ocean Monarch
Southern Cross
Northern Star (model)

These are the source photos for the section on Olympic’s builder’s model. Note that because the model is in a museum with less-than-ideal photography conditions, these images were all plagued to some degree by lighting issues and reflections in the glass case around the model. Nonetheless, I think they’re quite valuable.
1
2
3
4

The last section features a small selection of paintings and promotional materials depicting White Star Line ships. Although these may not be remotely accurate, the way artists perceived and replicated the color is still an important piece of the puzzle.
Olympic and Titanic, 1911
Majestic (V1 | V2 )
Catalogue cover
The two 1930s Olympic art pieces here are featured in White Star Buff: The case for more than one formulation of the color.

A few final notes:
-The program I used to sample the colors is the color picked from HTML Color Codes . For most images, I zoomed in a bit in order to get more pixels to sample, but larger parts of images tended to make colors that more closely resembled what my eyes perceived when looking at the whole image. Other programs or methods might result in somewhat different colors.
-This is an non-exhaustive chart; plenty of other photographs, models, paintings, etc. exist as well, and I didn’t comb every corner of the internet for every example I could find. The goal of this chart is to provide a visualization and samples of White Star Buff for artists to use, not to put forward a specific hypothesis regarding the color.

Further Reading and Resources:
Narrowing the Range of White Star Buff
Art Braunschwieger’s Titanic Paint Reference
A theory about the “White Star Buff” color applied to Titanic’s funnels

Description
I made a little color chart for a few variations of White Star Buff ages ago (you can see that here ). However, I felt like it was time for an upgrade - while my old chart was fine, it relied very heavily on the explanations in the description, so I figured I should make a version that, while still better with the description, can be interpreted just fine without it too. That way it’s easier for people to use!

The three colors on top are the same ones I focused on in my old chart. I created some simple light and shadow shades for the yellow and pink colors as well. They come from these articles:

White Star Buff: The case for more than one formulation of the color

White Star Buff: Weighing the Evidence

Some of the light and shadow shades for the “Ken Marschall color” come from Mike Brady’s work, which can be found here .

These are the source photos for the Nomadic section:

1

2

3

4

5

These are the source photos for the 1997 set section:

1 (I also used this image in my last WSB chart)

2

3

4

I also took color samples from various Shaw, Savill, and Albion Line ships. This is because the author of one of the above mentioned articles based their color formula on these ships’ livery, so I wanted to make my own comparison. None of my results were remotely similar to the yellow shown in that article; like with Nomadic - and thus presumably other ships with buff funnels - the color as a whole looks yellowish, but when it’s broken down into its component parts it appears brown. I don’t know why this happens, but it was a recurring theme throughout the research I did for this. Note also that the photos I used here were taken between the 1950s and the 1970s, and color photography was different then; pigments also degrade over time, so the photos used may not be true to life.
Anyway, these are the ships and photos I used in this section:
New Australia
Ocean Monarch
Southern Cross
Northern Star (model)

These are the source photos for the section on Olympic’s builder’s model. Note that because the model is in a museum with less-than-ideal photography conditions, these images were all plagued to some degree by lighting issues and reflections in the glass case around the model. Nonetheless, I think they’re quite valuable.
1
2
3
4

The last section features a small selection of paintings and promotional materials depicting White Star Line ships. Although these may not be remotely accurate, the way artists perceived and replicated the color is still an important piece of the puzzle.
Olympic and Titanic, 1911
Majestic (V1 | V2 )
Catalogue cover
The two 1930s Olympic art pieces here are featured in White Star Buff: The case for more than one formulation of the color.

A few final notes:
-The program I used to sample the colors is the color picked from HTML Color Codes . For most images, I zoomed in a bit in order to get more pixels to sample, but larger parts of images tended to make colors that more closely resembled what my eyes perceived when looking at the whole image. Other programs or methods might result in somewhat different colors.
-This is an non-exhaustive chart; plenty of other photographs, models, paintings, etc. exist as well, and I didn’t comb every corner of the internet for every example I could find. The goal of this chart is to provide a visualization and samples of White Star Buff for artists to use, not to put forward a specific hypothesis regarding the color.

Further Reading and Resources:
Narrowing the Range of White Star Buff
Art Braunschwieger’s Titanic Paint Reference
A theory about the “White Star Buff” color applied to Titanic’s funnels