"Painting Macedonian cavalry - early years" Topic

As is usual for me, whenever I ask a question here, I end up buying a new book. Most recently "The Macedonian War Machine,"
I have been working on a (WG Foundry) Macedonian army for some months now, taking my time as I want to get it "just right." The period I am going for is early in the Persian wars – say before Gaugamela.
The few books I have show the cloaks of the companions as having saffron with purple stripe and Thessalians with purple & white stripe. However, from what I can gather from above book, those seemed to have been issued after they captured tons of Persian cloth. So my question is, why color should I paint the cloaks for the early campaigns?
If your answer is, ‘paint them any color you want as we don't really know' – I am fine with that – so the question is, how did you paint yours?
As a secondary question, although most of the cav have linothorax (or however you spell that), some have a muscled cuirass (as do a few of the foot command figs).
Bronze or polished iron? Or both?

I painted mine many, many years ago. Going from memory purple and saffron were both very expensive dyes. I went with a dun, (tan), with a purple stripe for the Companions and blue with a white stripe for the Thessalians.

I figured saffron and purple would be too expensive for a full cloak for those units and just a very expensive purple stripe would show the elite status of the Companions.

After all that Persian cloth was captured it would be a different story, IMHO.

Peter Connelly's painting of the Battle of Granicus shows a bunch of different cloak colors for Companion cavalry before the Persian Empire was looted.

Non- bronze muscled cuirass would be tinned or silver plated bronze not iron. So very bright.

Some cuirasses in this period were iron. Probably rare though.

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