Painting Marpat

I got started on painting up some marines with a trial rifle team of 4 men. Digital camo seemed like quite a daunting task beforehand and trying to google for good tutorials just yielded multiple different takes on the subject that didn't really seem to be either practical or then looked a bit off.

Trying to imitate the pixelated graphics is pretty much suicidal and isn't very realistic either in this scale. I guess the best way is to get the uniform to look similar to what the real-life version would look like from roughly 30-40 meters away. To simulate the pixels I painted the paint blotches in horizontal and vertical stripes to have some sharp angles etc. This was actually surprisingly fast to do with the whole lot taking roughly an hour to get to this stage. Looks a bit rough still, but once the body armor and webbing are painted and a wash is applied, I'm hoping that it will end up looking a bit like the real thing.

Next up is painting the rest of their uniform and gear and then all their faces. I'm still not decided on whether to paint them with skin colours or with camo paint on their faces too. Maybe a simpler version of painted faces followed by slightly faded camo colours might do the trick. At least remembering from my own time in the army, the camo paints started to wear out very rapidly especially in the summer, leaving you with really faded colours that piled up in the creases of your skin.

In the background there's a small peak of an anti-tank platoon for Flames of War. Uniforms are finished. Now they just need weapons, helmets and the guns themselves painted.