Painting desert camofluage

[Prons]

how do i paint a desert camofluage pattern? and what colors do i need, can you give me an indepth guide?

[Less than Super Ostrich]

i had a "desert scheme" valkyrie on the old board. it was desert camouflage called Chocolate Chip

can someone bring a link to that one?

[David Hingtgen]

Desert what? Testors has added a lot of various desert tan/sand/yellow colors to their lines recently, most anything you could need. (Except desert pink I think, which is actually about the best, most "normal" looking desert color their is)

PS--Australia's current version of the chocolate chip camo schem is awesome, way cooler than ours (US).

::Edit:: Camo sheets! All the info diagrams/colors you could ask for:

PPS--the coolest desert camo there is, is what Israel uses on their F-16's.

http://users.skynet.be/exotic.planes/pictu...or/f16c_iaf.jpg

http://users.skynet.be/exotic.planes/pictu...or/f16a_iaf.jpg

Here's the USAF's standard generic sand scheme:

http://users.skynet.be/exotic.planes/pictu...lor/f16sand.jpg

Lots more schemes:

http://users.skynet.be/exotic.planes/htm/o...her/schemes.htm

Edited September 3, 2003 by David Hingtgen

[Prons]

Yea i like this one

http://users.skynet.be/exotic.planes/pictu...or/f18brown.jpg

but what paint colors would i need to buy for it?

Edited September 4, 2003 by Prons

[David Hingtgen]

See the numbers at the bottom of the pic? Those are the colors. Any hobby shop will sell paints that match. (Unless they're some really off colors)

::checks:: Well, actually that IS a really weird scheme. It's not really a desert scheme---too dark. Only one of the colors (30219) is commonly available. If you want to paint one without mixing your own colors, you're going to need to pick another scheme. (NSAWC is Topgun--they have their own unique schemes for training separate from the rest of the military. Plain old USAF, Navy, or IAF schemes would be much more likely to have paints available)

That's a scheme pretty much custom developed for the area around Fallon NAS, Nevada. (Which is why its so dark). Not your standard middle-eastern colored pinky-yellow sand.

[yellowlightman]

Lots more schemes:

http://users.skynet.be/exotic.planes/htm/o...her/schemes.htm

Thanks for that awesome site, David. Definately gives me some good ideas for customs.

[Prons]

i hate to keep using you for an encyclopedia on this but http://users.skynet.be/exotic.planes/pictu...lor/f16sand.jpg are thoes colors more comon?

[David Hingtgen]

Well I checked some of the other lines, and Testors makes 20400 in their MM II selection--that'll help a lot. Anyways---the newer "other" Testors lines have a LOT of yellows/browns. Even if they don't have the exact number, there's sure to be something close.

Here's the color charts for Testors:

http://www.testors.com/tes_cds/color_chart...M_(Acrylic).pdf Acrylics, all of them. Has 30277, which I can't imagine would be far off from 30279. (close numbers are generally close---the higher the number, the lighter the color--30100 would be a very dark brown, 30400 lighter, 30600 very light brown--so 30277 would be SLIGHTLY darker than 30279) I can explain the whole numbering system if you want, just ask.

http://www.testors.com/tes_cds/color_chart.../1700_MM_FS.pdf Military enamels, main line (30219 in here)

http://www.testors.com/tes_cds/color_chart...%20(Enamel).pdf Military enamels, secondary line. (20400 is in here as well as LOTS of sand colors--especially German ones for Africa, and modern US/UK Gulf colors)

There's almost as many colors in the acrylic line as the two enamels, but not quite.

You can look through these and see what's available.

PS--the 36270 for the F-16? That's because it's an F-16, not because of the scheme. Like 99% of F-16's have 36270 noses--it's inherent to the plane, they'd paint it to match the rest of the plane if they could. So don't worry about it on a valk or something.

PPS--don't trust the colors on the PDF charts at all. Way off. Just use them as a rough guide (mainly just to get the numbers). Most colors are really lighter than shown, and most greys are "blue-er" though some are browner.

The images on the site with the schemes looked to have much more accurate colors.

Edited September 4, 2003 by David Hingtgen

[Air Elijah]

You have a picture of the Australian one you are talking about David Hingten?

[Less than Super Ostrich]

Here is the chocolate chip I was talking about on my "Desert Ostrich":

[David Hingtgen]

Honestly, I haven't seen the latest version of Austrailian desert camo on one of their Hornets, mainly their uniforms and ground equipment! But it's not far off from the pic above, the main difference is that the overall color is much lighter--there's not much contrast between the two lighter colors.

Actually, the only places I've seen it were CENTCOM briefings. (Ones from Australia were very rare)

[Berttt]

Sorry Guys but the Australian Cam is nothing like the US choc chip. See below for our current desert cam.

and a pic of the scheme aour hornets had in the gulf

[Air Elijah]

Yeah, I was wondering if we had something new. The desert stuff we used in Afghanistan and Iraq was a new colour of the old AusCam right? Same shapes just different colours?

Btw, I seem to remember from my days in the army hearing that AusCam was developed by feeding a bunch of photos of Australian bushland into a computer program and having it come up with a pattern that best matched them all. It sounds a bit fanciful to me. From my experience if you do that kind of image processing you mainly come out with a single colour that is the average of all the input. Useless.

I'd like to know what the reality is there. Maybe the software looked for spikes in the colour data representing the most commonly repeated colours and their percentages. Again though, feeding a bunch of random photos in you'd expect the distribution to be pretty random and not have spikes.

Anyway, the camo is reasonably effective, more so in a forest environment. I guess that's why they came up with a desert version. Much of the soil in semi-arid Northern Australia is quite pale.

I remember one embarrassing moment on exercise. I was lead scout for my platoon and we were patrolling into an area to meetup with the rest of our company. I knew we were eventually going to bump into them but I came within 5 metres of a guy from another platoon who was just kneeling down before I saw him. If it was the enemy I'd have been dead, pretend like anyway. Gotta remember to check the foreground and not just the background and middle ground when scanning.... Luckily I was not required to signal or anything when we met up with them. I just pretended like I wasn't surprised and knew all along he was there and kept walking.

Excuse my rambling.

Edited September 23, 2003 by Air Elijah

[Macross_Fanboy]

I don't think the white spots are neccesary, but on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best, I'd give it a 9.5. Good job. An arctic camo would be sweet.