"How “accurate” do you go with paint colours?" Topic

When I started in the hobby, I tied myself in knots trying to get exact shades right.

Napoleonic Austrians? I chased that elusive "roebuck brown" for artillery coats.
French uniforms didn't help. They were full of wonderfully vague or poetic names like bleu céleste, aurore, gris de fer, vert dragon, and amarante. They sound precise but what do they really mean on the table?

Then you look further back. What was Roman purple? Not a neat, modern swatch. It varied enormously, from deep wine to almost crimson, depending on the batch of murex dye and how it aged. And it faded.

That's the thing that changed my thinking.

Historically:
Dyes faded quickly in sun and rain
Batches varied from workshop to workshop
Replacements and local procurement led to mismatched uniforms
Campaign wear altered everything anyway

Uniformity, in many periods, is more of a modern expectation than a historical reality.

These days I'm far less driven to chase the "perfect" shade. I aim for something plausible and visually coherent rather than exact.

That said, some things still matter—WW2 British Airborne berets are not bright red, for example. There are limits!

So where do you draw the line?

Do you chase exact historical shades?
Aim for "close enough"?
Or prioritise what looks right on the tabletop?

And have you had any "shock to the system" moments where accepted colours turned out to be… less certain than you thought?

I try to get in a reasonable ballpark if the paint color does not have a name, like US olive drab or Russian armor green.

For all the reasons you state plus we don't really know in most cases, good enough is good enough for me. When I actively served in the Army, there was always some variation in uniforms, and I was constantly matching trousers to blouses to get them as close as possible.

pjm

Anything pre-modern, don't worry about it too much. Anything WWII & on, very strict.

Damon.

For all the reasons above I'm pretty flexible, but I do try to use only colors that match skeins of wool dyed with natural dyes that I have actually seen. I'm not sure how to put it into words, but there's a quality about some shades that just says to me "chemical dye".

If I have an illustration of the 5th Fusiliers, in their glory if "Goose green" facings, I will delay paint them until I get the "right shade of green".
But, since I painted them, they've appeared on the table as the 5th just once. Usually they just play the part of some other regiment.

I paint any regiment that I have "reliable information" 🙄 on, but…
It's rare that they go on the table as that regiment.

Yeah. Dyes fade. And sometimes they aren't even dyed correctly. But I'm fine with that.

For uniforms, I try to get tone and shading right, and the hue is just approximated. My soldiers are going into battle in parade ground finery instead of soiled, patched, squalid field dress that always seems to be wet in places, so I feel it's inappropriate to worry too much about getting the colors perfectly right.

I worry much more about having colors that carry a distinctive national character – e.g. the blues of my Napoleonic French and Prussians should look quite different, but still pass as "dark blue" at a glance.

For cloth colors I also try to pick colors or painting styles that look desaturated. I own a lot of miniatures painted by others that are just too bright and loud, which gives the figures a cartoonish character. OTOH, I rarely paint figures anymore, so for the most part I just take what I get in flea markets or from paid painters, and go with it.

Most of my careful color matching is done for WWII planes, ships, tanks, and artillery. Here I also accept some variation from the precise modeler's paint chip match, but I like to start by finding out what the modelers think the color should be, and go from there.

For single-color planes (e.g. early IJN olive gray and USN light blue-gray, later war IJN "black green" and USN dark blue, USAAF olive drab, etc.) I like to pick a spray color that is close enough and use it as-is. I do the same for the base color of aircraft with two-color and three-color camo patterns, but the second/third colors have to be brush-on paint. Those can be even further off the historical mark, but the overall hue and tone of the colors together in the pattern must look approximately correct to the eye. That can be tricky to get right sometimes.

When I set out to do USN naval camo schemes for the Pacific War, I did a lot of color tests, and many different manufacturers' interpretations of the "correct" colors to get an idea what I was supposed to be aiming for. In my research I discovered that it became USN wartime practice to carry the same set of a few ingredients for making all the paint colors, meaning by sometime in 1942 all the ships at sea would be in colors in the same color family, regardless of light/dark gray tone and blue/gray hue. I ended up choosing a set of Tamiya spray paints and some closely matching bottle paints that had this sort of familial relationship.

Yes to all the above. And these days pretty much nobody examines them up close except me, unless I post a photo on Facebook. Sometimes I care, and sometimes I don't.

Some really thoughtful replies here—thanks, gents.

I'm struck by how much agreement there is in principle, even if we land in slightly different places.

Yellow Admiral's point about "national character" really resonates with me. The idea that French and Prussian blues should both read as dark blue, but still look different on the table. That feels like a very practical middle ground between accuracy and effect & I thought I was the only one to do this.

Likewise 79thPA and mckrok—"reasonable ballpark" / "good enough"—which, the more I think about it, is probably closer to historical reality than we sometimes admit.

And Garand draws an interesting line at WWII. That does seem to be the tipping point where standardisation (and documentation) starts to tighten things up—though even there, as mckrok authoritively wrote, there's still variation and interpretation.

I also liked Eumelus's comment about some colours just looking like chemical dyes. Hard to define but you know it when you see it—that slightly harsh, modern brightness versus something more muted and organic.

And John the OFM may have hit the most wargamer-truth of all—spending ages getting a regiment "right"… and then using it as something else entirely!

It does make me wonder if we're really dealing with three different goals rather than one:
Regulation (what should have been worn)
Historical accuracy (what was actually worn)
Visual plausibility (what looks believable)

Those don't always point in the same direction.

So a follow-on question:

If you had to sacrifice one of those three—accuracy, plausibility, or tabletop effect—which one goes first?

And does your answer change depending on the period?

Oh, accuracy no doubt. My object is a decent soldierly appearance, regiments identifiable when regulations made thisw possible, and in any event one unit distinguishable from another. In the smallest scales, the important thing is being able to tell at a glance what troop type a unit is, and what army it belongs to. These things are by no means always the case historically, but these are toy soldiers--not one-offs in a glass case, or an order of battle report to military superiors.

'Close enough for Government Work'

When you consider these were "government contract", close enough should work

I mostly go for close enough. I tend to paint my figures too dark and now am working on lightening them up for a better table top effect.

I once had a Napoleonic Army of Italy where I intenionally painted the men's coats in a variety of different shades of dark blue to make them look "Ragged."

I do not expect another player to challenge if the shade I used was ok with him.

I go with close enough. I have looked into research materials and it says something like indigo blue. Then when sourcing paint there's 4 shades from 4 manufacturers calling themselves indigo. So, I go with what I like. To me it's all about effect and there is a wear factor in any uniform once it takes the field.

Close enough. But I do so little historic that it doesn't matter.

I have often said, unless somebody pulls out a time-travelling photographer with an accurate digital color camera who has journeyed to ancient times and back, we don't really know "exactly" what color anything was. And as others have noted, dye batches varied greatly, as did dyes, and we know that throughout history people have substituted one dye (and its actual color) for another dye of a variant hue. So I don't get too fussy about it.

Close enough is good enough. There are too many factors involved for a miniature to be "accurate".

Close enough, but I do try and get the general colours and tones 'right', based on what we know. I am more picky with some things than others, particularly aircraft.

As other people have said, in some periods, it is useful to differentiate by tone, even if everyone is supposedly wearing 'blue' or 'red'.

Also consider the scale effect – the smaller the figure, the darker it will appear on the tabletop

Also consider that colour as seen by the eye is relative – there are lots of optical illusions to demonstrate this. One takeaway is that the amount of contrast will affect how we see a specific colour

The above are of course a desperate attempt to justify that I would drop accuracy in a heartbeat

John

Right now I am painting us cavalry for Plains Wars. The blues are an issue, both the darker blue jackets and the lighter blue britches. The online and Osprey art gives a wide range, and what I like is prettier than what was probably real. I will probably go with pretty but may feel guilty about it.