ATOM Modern Amunition Colors Set

Six shades for modern ammunition

The set aims at the small things that lie beside a vehicle or inside a fighting compartment: cartridge cases, grenades, transport crates and boxes for ammunition belts. It is these that give a finished scene its sense of scale, because a viewer knows them from photographs and spots at once when they are painted in a single flat color.

Inside you will find six bottles of the ATOM acrylic line. Three cover matte surfaces: olive green for crates and boxes from the depot, a darker gray for pressed sheet metal containers and satin black for rubber and non-metal parts. The remaining three are metallic, that is aluminum, brass and a blue-green metallic lacquer.

The brass will do the most work. Spent cartridge cases appear in a diorama almost every time, and their tone changes according to how long they have lain on the ground. A weak filter or a dark varnish over the base coat turns shiny metal into a used piece. Aluminum, by contrast, suits joints, closures and the heads of practice rounds.

The paints work under a brush and in an airbrush, they thin with water and a short pause between coats is enough. It pays to mix a transition between the brass and the olive green on the palette, because metallic pigments get on well with opaque shades and the transition takes the sharpness off the edges.

The range of use is not tied to one scale: the same thing suits large crates in a diorama and small rounds scattered around a figure.

Before application it pays to degrease the surface and let it dry, because metallic pigments hold less well on greasy plastic than opaque matte tones. A matte or satin varnish then seals the finished surface, depending on whether the cartridge case should still shine or already blend into the dust around it.