"Color for Japanese Uniform" Topic

Looking for color suggestions, preferably Vallejo, but would also consider Ammo and AK, for painting standard Japanese island occupation troops, circa 1942.

I use 988 Khaki and a dark wash of black or brown for my Japanese uniforms. Flat Brown for the leathers and Stone Grey for any fabric straps. Russian WWII Uniform for puttees.

Thanks, BP…that gives me a good direction for my next paint order!

Well, Vallejo makes a "Japanese uniform" color. It's seems on the greener side of khaki to me. You need to experiment with washes and highlights to suit your taste.

Japanese uniforms came in a couple of different flavors and tended to fade very rapidly in tropical areas. They ranged from a khaki-ish/greenish for Asia/SE Asia, to a tan or green ochre or even yellow ochre color in the south Pacific. Again, both faded rapidly and so were typically very light.

Like most uniforms of WWII, no one color is right.

Different sources of cloth and fading gives a wide array.
This is stolen from this blog:
link

Test colors:

Great stuff…thank you!

I'm going to ask:

1) What scale?

The reason is the smaller the figure the lighter the colour should be.

2) What method of painting are you going to use?

The reason is any wash/dip darkens the colours it is used on. So again, the base colours need to be even lighter is painting this way. If you are using a 3shade lightening technique your base will be darker, instead.