"No such thing as Khaki???" Topic

atthefront.com/khaki.html

I have been having fits over which color to paint these for years….Lol…

Khaki is from an Indian word meaning "dust coloured" so I would go D or E.
my ww1 western front Brits are more towards E but that's just the paint I had.
I think you could pick any colour and not lose sleep over it. Or all the colours!!!

This is true of all colors of all uniforms ever.

There's no "true color" of anything in the military, be it uniforms or vehicles or whatever. Age of the garment or time since vehicle's last repaint, amount of dirt/dust/mud on the article, different factories using slightly different dyes/paints, etc, etc. Basically pick any paint that's in the ballpark color-wise and you're correct.

I usually pick up a color that resembles the "new" look as the base color, and then, depending on my mood I light it up towards beige or darken down towards some kind of brownish look. That gaves a good mix of shades to my units.

"Some shading differences are permissible". That's from the 1973 US Army uniform regulations so I take that line as the founding principle of all my painting.

Just get Vallejo US Field Drab and you're golden!

It says right on the bottle its the correct color.

Some materials fade more readily than others, as do paints.

Cotton/canvas is generally fairly awful, wool less so. I would be extremely surprised to see WW2 British Battledress in bright green or faded tan. KD otoh may well have faded to a much lighter shade after being bleached by the sun.

Similarly feldgray wool vs HBT uniforms. Guy Sajer described the latter fading to 'piss yellow', which given their material and greenish colour to start with is not surprising. Even repro HBTs do that after a few years.

Wool uniforms are more likely to go brownish with ingrained dirt.

Having been in the US military for 25 years, the last half of my career joint, and even with modern dyes and QC standards no matter the color coming from the factory eventually each uniform takes on its own shades. As others have said will be dependent on wear (including what climates), washing and even the use of starch. It also seems to be a universal. When stationed with UN forces representing a wide variety of countries and uniforms you could see the same issues.

Life Colors has two sets for US uniforms in their collection of paints. These may be a good place to start for those looking for a basic beginning shade. Unfortunately, as with most Life Color sets it is almost impossible to find single bottles from the set.

@Marc33594 – i have used some of the Life Color paint for airbrushing AFVs, how does it work for painting individual minis? What scale figs do you use it on?

I've used lifecolour paints with a brush on figures: I find two coats or else applying it a little thicker than usual works.

Painting the figures correctly is easy! When you're done, if they all look the same, you did it wrong ~,~

So far the only set of theirs I have is their Rust and Dust set and use that for 15mm, especially exhaust systems. I find they brush fine right from the bottle. I am tempted to try the US paint sets for 20mm figures as I am just moving into that scale for skirmish games. It seems like their are a lot of bottles in those sets I wont get much use from however.

Marc, yeah, I should try what I have with a brush just to see what it works now that I think about. I have one of their AFV sets and a dust set (paint and pigment).

That is the trouble with the sets – some of the colors could be really great but they're spendy if you don't use all of them.

Thanks for the feedback all.

Will this thread end all the other WW2 "What Color Should I Paint? threads???"

It will be the thread to end all threads.

The mother of all threads?

Sadly I suspect 'paint them whatever colour you like as long as it is greenish/brownish/tanish/greyish' isn't going to satisfy people who demand the exact Vallejo numbers for painting the shoulder boards of the 431st Field Sanitation Regiment.

For some odd reason I always used to paint my US troops dark green when I was a kid! Airfix box art on the US marine set possibly.