Fw: Afterthought: camo on 6mm infantry

Forwarded from Stuart:

I asked:
> I had a painting question that was affected by Delayed Action
Intelligence until the drive home:  how do you give the impression of
camo on 6mm infantry?  I'm thinking of IF troops in khaki with tan
splotches, dark brown speckles, and PAU in sage green with olive and
yellow tiger stripes.

Stuart said:
> Painting cam on 6m,m is tough.  its too easy just to obscure the
figure.  My reccomendation would be to just paint the armour section
of th efigure in cam and paint inthe fatigues in a neutral
brown/green.  Painting the cam is then similar to a 25/15mm figure
except you generally would paint less cam than on the larger figs.
This is for two reasons, first its very hard to paint realistic cam on
a 6mm and second, the 'besst' cam on 6mm is an impression of cam
rather than cam.  OK, so 'how to'  for the IF I would work them up
like the 25mm UN figs, first off a very pale Kahki (GW bleached bone),
wash brown ink, then 'splotch' with a contrast colour, (GW Bestial
brown).  As for small dark spots its best to use a dark brown (GW
Scorched earth) or black.  If you paint in this way as a general guide
for coverage the first contrast colour would cover say 66% of the
armour, the dark second 33% and the final dark 10% or less.  I would
paint the under fatigues in another khaki colour, perhaps one shade
lighter then the contrast tan (GW Snakebite leather).  This will
result in a fig with cam armour which will stand out against botht eh
fatiggues and the skin of the fig (skin in flesh washed with not so
dilute flesh wash darkened with a little brown ink.
>
> PAU, olive and yellow will work in 25mm but not so wel in 15/6mm,
especially over a light base colour.  The problem is one of contrast.
the pale colours blend into one another a little too much in th
esmaller scales.  How about a compromise of sage green with dark green
stripes with a mustard yellow center (like US tiger stripe).  Again,
the idea is to impart the thought of cam, so the colours would be in a
similar ratio to the IF.  In this case I would use your olive green
for the fatigues, it will produce a nice contrast.
>
> OK, given my advocacy of contrast there is another technique but it
is more time consuming and a real pain for 6mm, its better for 25mm
and 15mm.  A way to generate contrast with all cam is to paint the cam
of the fatigues in a different pattern to that of the body armour.  If
you choose two very different patterns it can work very well as one
contrasts the other but thye are both cam so giving an overall
military look.	To mo this is like a unit redeploying with no time to
erpaint its armour (this is more commonly seen with webbing and
weapons - watch the Afghanistan stuff, most of the US/Euro troops have
desert kit but green webbing)  this is a nice trick to build contrast
in a very small fig without loosing the 'look' of a soldier.