Salutations, gentlefolk !
I asked my friend Cathy Raymond – maker of Viking-era reenactor costumes, blogger at link and generally wonderful person – if she might like to add to this. So, if you would, read below. I shall implore her to put further ideas on her blog:
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What I have read and learned about Viking costume gives me a fair number of opinions--more than I realized I had when I started typing this.
While it's true that pastel dyed colors were, in the Viking age, cheaper than full deep tones (because less time and effort involved), there's no real indication that the Vikings who did not rank highly enough to afford deeply dyed clothes preferred pastels to simply sticking with undyed fabric (perhaps woven with two-different shades of undyed thread). There's an exception of sorts to this with regard to using dyes on linen, which I'll get to below.
Because the fabrics available in period took up the available dyestuffs (e.g., woad, madder) at different rates and intensities, you have to have some idea which fabrics your guys would have been wearing, and for which garments, to get a good idea what colors it would be plausible to paint them.
For example, an undershirt would likely have been made from linen, which takes most vegetable dyes poorly. Linen's natural colors vary with where it's grown and how it's prepared to become fiber, but in general the plausible colors are white (after bleaching the fiber in the sun), offwhite, tan/beige, and light gray.
Wool's undyed color would depend on what color the available sheep were, and also whether you wove your fabric using fiber with more than one color of wool (think LLBean ragg sweaters as one possible example of a mixed wool color).
It has never been clear to me, by the way (possibly this unclarity is my ignorance of some of the sources; possibly it's due to the fact that the archaeologists, chemists, and other scholars haven't obtained enough information to make reasonable guesses), whether Viking farmsteads experimented with their own dyes or just bought/traded for fabric ready-dyed.
All that seems to me to be known is that the wealthier people had dyed fabric because scraps remaining in the graves are dyed--almost always some shade of blue (anywhere from light to dark) or red (ditto).
I know of one 5th century grave with tablet woven trim, mostly red, but including yellow and green in the design--but no indication of shirts, gowns or pants that were primarily yellow or green--though such colors were, as advocate says on the Minatures Page, achievable with the existing plants and technology.
By a happy chance, woad and madder are two of the vegetable dyes available to the Vikings that take to a noticeable extent on linen. They do not take nearly as well as they do on wool, however. We have found wool scraps in Viking graves that had so much woad in the fibre that they likely would have been a navy color that was nearly black.
Linen probably never made it past a bird-egg blue with woad, or a light to medium pink (or orangish shade) on madder. But we don't have enough surviving scraps to get a real idea how much of the population--even the wealthy population--wore dyed clothes most of the time, or what colors which segments of the population preferred.
Finally, the color of one's sheep becomes relevant again when you're thinking of dyeing fiber. It's easy enough to dye yellow and green, yes. But only on white or near-white, and the likeliest white fabric available in the VA was going to be linen, not wool. White sheep were relatively rare, so any dyeing on wool would be done over shades of gray or brown of varying darkness.
Reenactors, for all their virtues, don't usually think about these factors (especially the color of one's sheep) when making their clothes. They tend to dress in all the colors attainable with natural dyes on WHITE fabrics--which is likely a bit too colorful in the wrong ways from what the Vikings actually would have worn. I've done this too--for example, I have some nice faux linen tunics in mustardy yellows--but so far as I know the yellows available to the Vikings couldn't have achieved them on linen.
So to get back to the question that arose in the thread you asked me to read, here's my opinions, for what it's worth, given that I'm not an archaeologist, let alone a PhD on these subjects:
1) Any miniature depicting a Viking with a spangenhelm and/or a sword was wealthy enough to afford some dyed items in his wardrobe, and he would have worn them to fight, especially to duel (this kind of dressing up shows up in the sagas). That's probably going to include most male figures you'll be painting for a Viking army.
2) A miniature depicting a Viking with an axe and/or a spear plus a shield probably would have at least one dyed garment--probably a cloak.
3) A miniature depicting a Viking with just a spear should probably be shown wearing clothing in undyed fabric colors.
4) Types of garments, and the colors they likely would have been in period, include:
* Shirts/tunics (could be layered, of course)--white, offwhite, beiges, light grays, light blue, pinks (NOT POLISH CRIMSON AT LEAST NOT ON LINEN!)
* Pants--if an undergarment worn as outerwear during the summer--same colors as above. If wool pants, offwhite (undyed white wool), grays, beiges, browns, reds (light or dark), blues (light or dark), blacks with brown, blue or red undertones.
* Tunics (i.e., a shirtlike garment worn over a linen shirt)--same colors as pants.
* Hoods--same colors as pants. If the inside of the hood can be seen and it's clear the thing isn't lined with fur, I'd presume it was linen-lined and the linen colors should be used.
* Cloaks--almost certainly wool. Use browns for poorer men, blue, black or red for wealthy ones.
* Belts, boots and other leather items--shades of brown. I know of no evidence that the Vikings used dyed leather. That was done later in the Middle Ages (red and black were the most popular colors of dyed leather, by the way), but I don't know of reason to believe that the Vikings did so.
Any of these garments (except the boots and belts) COULD be trimmed with a silk band (made from strips of cut-up, really expensive silks) or a wool band (made by tablet-weaving of wool thread in different colors).
Because silk and wool take vegetable dyes just fine, a small amount of white wool could probably located and was used for tablet weaving for/by the rich, and silk naturally comes in pale, easy-to-dye shades anyway, these bands could be any color achievable with vegetable dyes.
Anyway bands used to trim clothing by wealthy Vikings could even contain silver or gold thread--though not as much, say, as in the Migration Period, when ancient Roman gold and silver were still sloshing around at a relatively high rate.
For your purposes, that means painting a thin band of color around the edges of necklines, sleeves, and hems. If you have the patience, consider doing a "band" around the edge of a garment by alternating little dots of different colors of paint right next to each other.
5) With regard to stripes and plaids, again, such patterns are certainly available with VA weaving technology. But the scraps found in the graves show things like tattersall plaids and pinstripes so thin that you wouldn't be able to depict them accurately at 15, 25, or 35mm scale--and the few scraps that are patterned are very rare anyway.
5) FINALLY, my recommendations for Viking bundle colors.
Clothing: White, offwhite, tan, beige, grays, browns, black. Deep red, deep (though not black) blue, possibly a terracotta-ish shade of red, possibly red-brown, possibly muted oranges (madder sometimes does weird things even on wool).
Accessories: Metallic gold, silver, bronze. Suitable browns, perhaps ochres, for leather products.
Horses: Vikings didn't fight from horseback--they used horses as transport only. In Iceland, the horses available are a lot like the surviving "Icelandic horse" breed there today--very stocky and short as ponies. If you find a miniature showing one, let me know. But if your Viking miniatures show horses, by all means use the "horse [color] bundle" referred to in the thread.
I'd use true yellows and greens for trims only.
Let me know if you have questions about any of this. Thanks.
