thewhiteduke | 17 Apr 2014 3:33 a.m. PST |
No, this is not another discussion on the cornflower blue shade. But rather the correct shade of GREEN for both the Chevaux Legers and the Light Btns for the 1809 campaign. It is described as 'Light green' changing to 'dark green' later that year. What is 'Light green'? Osprey (von Pivka) illustrations have the cavalry in an almost apple green. I suppose their interpretation of light green is bright green!? But as we have seen with the blue, light blue does not necessarily mean bright! Photos I have seen from the Inglostadt museum has the tunics as a pale washed out green, almost a yellow olive. link But I'm not sure if that is the pre- or post-1809 colour change. For the Light Btns, Cantlers plates don't seem to change the depth of colour throughout the period?? So my main question I put to you experts out there, what could be considered 'Light green', examples of colours of paints from respective manufacturers would be very helpful. Secondly
is the light green of the cavalry the exact same light green for the light btns?
Many thanks |
MajorB | 17 Apr 2014 3:43 a.m. PST |
At about 200 years distance from the historical events, it is almost impossible to determine any actual shades of material used in Napoloenic uniforms. Dyes were not colour-fast the way they are now so there would be fading due to sunlight, wear, etc. In other words, we don't know. |
jeffreyw3 | 17 Apr 2014 5:02 a.m. PST |
:) Speaking as someone who actually went to the length of researching period dyes and paints, I can say with some assurance that the Major is correct--there is absolutely no way of knowing absolutely, so go with whatever works for you. From an artistic point of view, these are toys, so again find a style that suits your ability and taste. If bright apple green (which didn't exist then) looks best to you, paint on. I've seen some gorgeous painting over the years, but nothing that really resembles the texture of the real thing. Probably the best example of Napoleonic uniforms outside of museums would be Bondarchuk's "War and Peace." The guy was a certified authenticity nut, and he had the advantage of having Soviet factories at his disposal. Great examples of uniforms in the field fading, staff officer's uniforms, and the differences in material and dye between officers and enlisted. |
marshalGreg | 17 Apr 2014 8:18 a.m. PST |
Who is going to argue? Perhaps they are not worth spending time playing with your collection! and Who is going to argue to a color you used taken/matched from the actual museum clothing? Can't go wrong there! Paint on! Keep in mind that actual change and date of the order to change was always much much much later, if at all! MG |
vonMallard | 17 Apr 2014 8:28 a.m. PST |
use differant shades to represent fading and field use. No Uniform survives the sun and dirt. |
BTCTerrainman | 17 Apr 2014 9:50 a.m. PST |
Contact me off list (or PM your email address to me). I have photos from the Bayern Armee Museum of period uniforms. I would be happy to email some photos to you. |
MajorB | 17 Apr 2014 10:31 a.m. PST |
(or PM your email address to me) He can't PM you, he's not a Supporting Member. I have photos from the Bayern Armee Museum of period uniforms. Presumably these are photos of 200 year old uniforms? If so, they will have faded over time
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spontoon | 17 Apr 2014 6:57 p.m. PST |
There is definitely a shade difference between the 1789 uniform and the 1809 uniform green. |
Rudi the german | 18 Apr 2014 2:06 a.m. PST |
Go to Ingolstadt and take a look at the orginal uniforms. :) |
thewhiteduke | 18 Apr 2014 8:24 a.m. PST |
Oh Rudi if only the wife would think it just as important. I would to walk the battlefields and towns of the area. Thank you all for taking the time to respond. To answer a few subsidiary questions. No I wouldn't get upset if another gamer said it was the wrong pantone code of green, I'm a big boy. I'm not anal enough to get into minutiae of "what the colour of the leather that straps held the water canteen, and which side it was slung"..but I am OCD enough to want to get the major points as correct as possible. ie. the tunics trousers and unit markings. So if I can ask a couple of secondary questions? 1/ If they did not have the bright coloured dyes then, what would be the closest to a light green they did have in reference to modern colours? 2/ How much fade does occur over 200 years? 50%, 80% etc. Would it be possible to visually reverse fade it from an approximate fade-age value? Thanks |
jeffreyw3 | 18 Apr 2014 3:53 p.m. PST |
Another great source, which I use all the time are re-enactors. I have it a little easier because I'm working with the Russians, and Borodino pops up every year, but these guys live "authenticity" and you can get a pretty good feel for how things would have looked right off the "rack." :-) As far as what I would consider "reasonable" green, this works:
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MajorB | 20 Apr 2014 5:09 a.m. PST |
1/ If they did not have the bright coloured dyes then, what would be the closest to a light green they did have in reference to modern colours? We have no way of knowuing as the only reference material we have is surviving fabric which of course has faded. 2/ How much fade does occur over 200 years? 50%, 80% etc. Would it be possible to visually reverse fade it from an approximate fade-age value? Again, no way of knowing, since all we have is the 200 year old faded material. We do not know what shade it started out at. Also the rate of fading will vary with where and how the fabric has been looked after or stored over the years. Clearly fabric that has been kept away from sunlight will have faded less than similar fabric that has not. Equally, material that has been washed or immersed in water will have faded more than if not. |
thewhiteduke | 18 May 2014 5:05 a.m. PST |
Many thanks all for your advice. More questions to follow. |
Supercilius Maximus | 20 May 2014 9:40 a.m. PST |
In this period, green cloth was still produced by a two-step process, dyeing the material with blue and then yellow (or vice-versa). Which order this was done in, for how long each was used, and which of the two dyes was stronger in tone, would determine the shade of green you ended up with – and also the speed and nature of its reaction to sunlight and/or rain. Without being any sort of expert on the uniform warrants/regulations of this era, it's quite possible that the differences between the pre- and post-1809 greens may have been unintentional and nothing more than different outcomes of the same process, or possibly the result of buying from different clothing contractors. As others have pointed out, Cantler (who is probably the best of the "cigarette card" type of artist for Bavarian uniforms) uses a wide range of tones for his infantry and cavalry plates – including the dreaded "cornflower blue" which he shows as anything from dark (almost royal) blue to something greyer. Whilst taking account of MajorB's sound caveat, there is a surviving light infantry officer's coatee in Ingoldstadt, and it is quite a dark tone, with a lot of blue – the effect is almost a dark turqoise. You might also want to look at the paintings of Kobell, who was contemporary and saw Bavarian troops in the field quite a lot. Another point to consider is how "flexible" (timewise) you want your figures to be – do you want to have to paint separate units for pre-1809 battles? I would guess not. |
1968billsfan | 31 Jul 2016 4:58 a.m. PST |
Ouch. Just to make the situation more uncertain, consider the following. Colors were usually dyed with a two step process: first take a mortant (a metal ion solution), which attached to the fabric protein and gave completely different shades. Then boil with the dyestuff, which attached to the mortan metal salt. Change either of these, change the times of contact or the concentration, and you changed the colour. To make life more interesting, very slight traces of other metals in the dyebath, tying pot or original salt would change the colour again greatly. You NEVER used an iron pot, because then the iron would be the dominate mortant. In hobby dying of home raised sheep wool, you almost never get the same shade. I wonder how different the "same" colour cloth was within the same military unit. |
Terry37 | 31 Jul 2016 11:55 a.m. PST |
Excellent thread and most interesting! Terry |
Edwulf | 11 Aug 2016 5:40 p.m. PST |
What scale are you painting? less than 28mm and you need to start exaggerating the "brightness" of certain colors anyway so they stand out. I'm in agreement. We can make assumptions but other than blue/red/green/black/white/yellow you have quite a large remit. In 28mm I tend to go for more dusty natural looking shades. 6mm everything is much more vivid and colorful just to compensate for the small size. |
1968billsfan | 01 Sep 2016 4:36 a.m. PST |
…..and even if God himself gave you a genuine cloth swatch to copy, you have to remember that our paint results will be [1] on small figures, so any colour will look darker than if you painted that paint on a say 2x3 inch card [2] a victim of the type of lighting that you have over your game table as well as the paint composition. About [2], consider the following scientific explanation.
"light" "colour" is a combination of photons, each of which is characterized by it's wavelength (or frequency).. c (the speed of light) = lamda(wavelength) x U (frequency). The sun is a good "white light source" in that it sends out nearly an equal amount of all wavelenths (or colors). A prism or rainbow spreads all these out into stripes so we can see them all. The sun put out equal amounts of each wavelength. Our indoor lighting doesn't. An incadesent bulb is a heated piece of tungsten- it doesn't have the same amounts of each wavelength as the sun. A floruescent bulb has phosphers on the inside of a plasma tube. It doesn't have the same amounts of wavelenghts as the sun. So if the "light" in your wargame room doesn't match the sun, you will not be able to see that colour. Now the second part of the two sequential events is whether you have that colour in your paint. You might have, say, a blue light colour in your light. But for you to see a blue colour in your figure, you have to have that blue colour in the figure. If the right colour is not there, well then that blue light is lost. If the blue colour is on the figure, then it can temporarily "absorb" that light photon and then spit it out (reflect it) back to your eyeball. So you say, that you see that colour blue. As an example for all this, listen to the story about sodium arc lamps and red cars in parking lots. A sodium arc lamp is a cheap, low energy using sort of light that sometimes is used in shopping plaza parking lots. (They heat up salt (NaCl) in a plasma and it produces a lot of yellow looking light. Pour salt on a campfire or stove and you will see this colour). But that light does not have any red colour in it. So if you have a red car and go out into that parking lot- you will not see your red car. There is no red colour from the lightpoles, so there is no red being reflected from your car. Your car now looks black. Anyway, my point is that what the figures look like on the table depends on what your lights are as well as the painting. |
1968billsfan | 01 Sep 2016 5:17 a.m. PST |
Lets add another piece of weirdness to the discussion. The early Greeks did not have a word for the color "blue". Gladstone noticed this in the Illyid and Homer. In fact, they described a "wine colored sea" rather than a blue sea. Hebrew, Japanese and some other languages do not have or have only recently possess the word "blue". Some languages have multiple words for blue as well. The explanations for this have been debated quite a bit- it seems that it is a matter of how the culture and thought-patterns develop. see link as well as a short video link for an entry into all this. |
Scott Sutherland | 04 Feb 2017 12:14 p.m. PST |
Just to help make the issue more confusing. It appears the technique to get green cloth is to first dye the cloth blue and then dye it yellow. The net effect gives you green. So not only do you have the colour inconsistencies of one colour you have two and the fun of them mismatching. Not to mention differing levels of colour fastness and light deterioration. Even Napoleon's uniforms seem to be a problem. Have a look at link |
HP2Sport | 05 Feb 2017 1:04 a.m. PST |
Good informative discussion. |
deadhead | 05 Feb 2017 3:14 a.m. PST |
Indeed, see Marbot's "green" hussar rig in la Musee de L'Armee too |
von Winterfeldt | 05 Feb 2017 4:34 a.m. PST |
there were two methods, green on white and indeed yellow on blue, which is also recommended for the Austrian green clad cavalry – with the intention when the green on white fades, one is getting a dirties green grey colour – while on the other hand – when the yellow faded – a blue coat would emerge which would look more pleasent to they eye. The Russians on the other hand seemingly did make more stable green colour |