"Painting 6mm 1980s British infantry" Topic

Can anyone recommend some acrylic colors for my mid-1980s Cold War British infantry? I'm thinking the DPM will be essentially impossible to model at this scale, but I'm happy to be proved wrong.

Paint the uniforms sand overall, add random swirls of lightish reddish brown and lightish green with a very fine brush. Pick out webbing in drab green. Then black wash everything.

What brand of minis are you using for your Brits? I'm going to start on a project in the same time period and need the foot troops.

I'm using Heroics and Ros 6mm British, for Fistful of TOWs 3.

The predominant tone of DPM is green. In smaller scales I just drybrush green over a black undercover and lightly stipple sand, then add more green to tone it down if required.

For 15mm and up I start with a sand base and do what John does.

Do you recommend a shade of green that looks approximately right?

The predominant tone might be green, but the base I believe is sand. If I remember correctly the Army gave the job of designing the Denison smock, the forerunner of the DPM, to an artist who took a brush and painted random flowing patterns on the smock. If you look at the Denison smock, and the DPM, the sand base is overlaid with the other colours which have the look of flowing brush strokes.

The quality-control in DPM manufacture was absolutely diabolical prior to the CS95 Pattern. Greens could therefore vary from dark bottle-green to light olive drab or grass green. The sand base could similarly vary from a greenish ochre to curry-powder yellow and the brown could vary from a very dark mahogany to a lurid orange-brick-red.

So just take your pick.

DPM also generally looks very dark (even black) at a distance, due to all the dark brown and black in the scheme, so I would opt for darker shades, to stand out against the sand base. Underscoating black or black-washing is therefore a good idea.

This is quite a good tutorial, though quite a time-consuming process

link

Awesome, thanks for the link, Milites! Most helpful.