Need color advice

[rayvn26]

Greetings everyone. I have a question. I am wanting to start a new Astra Militarium (god I hate that name) and I know the infantry models I want will come from Mad Robot Miniatures with vehicles coming from Games Workshop. It'll be a nice change from a decade of painting Blood Angels and other people's stuff, time for me to do something I want, right? Anyways the style I'm shooting for is kind of a Modern Day Military, as I'm an old Army Vet from '89-'99, so I'll be using dudes in fatigues and different heads and weapons for different unit types, like elites and what have you, dunno the units they get as I don't have their book yet.
 

So the camouflage color I'm wanting to use is Multicam, and what I'm needing to know is what colors do I need to paint it up like that. They don't need to be exact or anything. I was looking at Scale 75's Ambush color set but I dunno how close it is. I was also looking at Ammo by Mig's colors and Vallejo, Citadel, AK, The Army Painter, and them paints from Flames of War. I've hit a wall so I've come to you fine folks for some much needed advice on how to achieve this.

 

Thank you for your time,

     Rayvn

[Major_Gilbear]

I say this hesitantly, but real camo is designed to be effective at ranges of about 15m+, by blurring the outlines of the camouflaged object into the background. Translated into 28mm miniatures scale, it means that if you paint the camo accurately/well, the figures will start to visually blur from about a foot away.

 

Considering that we normally paint miniatures to look good from a typical distance of about 3-4 feet, this means that brighter colours and contrast are particularly important if we want the models to stand out.

 

Now, I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't do multicam, but I would certainly consider doing a brighter, bolder and simplified version of it. This will give the impression of the "correct" camouflage, but it won't cause you to lose any figures on the table during/after a game! ;)

 

Keeping that in mind, I found this blog which had some suggested Vallejo colours that might help you. A simplified version of multicam is covered in this blog, which I think would work well with a little tweaking of colours, and contains a link to a third (and more complicated) version that uses old versions of the Citadel paints.

[rayvn26]

Nice! Yeah I was planing on using a little more contrasting colors for the greens and browns on the infantry so they don't get "lost" plus using black or something for the weapons and combat webbing (pouches and such) to help break up the camo.

 

Thing is, most the Imperial Guard armies I see are khaki fatigues and green armor or something along those lines with a pretty basic 2 color sometimes 3 on vehicles. I'm wanting to break that mold with this new army. I'm thinking multicam will help with that and I'm toying with the idea of the colors but in a digital pattern on the vehicles.

Edited October 26, 2017 by rayvn26

[Brother Tyler]

Your camouflage pattern would be:

 

 

 

Skipping forward two decades to multicam, though...

 

 

Oddly enough, I was thinking about updating our color chart to cover the new Citadel colours today, but I haven't gotten around to it. In the meantime, the image above (the bottom one for those of you that aren't certain ) should provide a decent model for those that can provide more help than me.

 

As far as painting camouflage on 28mm miniatures goes, I recommend that you paint the pattern much larger than life size. Another thing you might consider is simply using the real scheme as a model, but paint the miniatures in a stylized version that evokes the real pattern. Either or both of these options will mitigate the blending problem (that Major_Gilbear described) somewhat.