British Caunter Colors

Camouflage from the Western Desert

At the turn of 1940 and 1941 the British units in North Africa tried out a camouflage pattern of a kind you will see nowhere else. It bore the name of the commander of an armored brigade who pushed it through, and what made it special were the sharply angled bands, laid out so as to break the shape of the hull and the turret up into several separate areas at a distance. It was not about blending with the sand but about a deception in the outline, which was to make it harder for an observer to judge the distance and the direction of travel.

The six shades

Inside is the silver gray that makes the whole pattern so unmistakable, then two light stone tones differing in warmth, a deep green, a khaki green and a purple brown. The combination makes it possible to build the early form of the pattern as well as its later variants, when the lightest fields were given up.

How to build the pattern

Here, exceptionally, no soft transition is worked with. The fields are meant to have a sharp edge, so masking tape or a thin cut stencil strip pays off. The work goes from the lightest tone to the darkest and the edges are left to dry through thoroughly before the next spraying, or the tape will pull the paint away. Once the masks are off, it is worth passing a dry brush lightly along the edge, so that it does not look printed.

On which machines

The pattern was worn by cruiser as well as infantry tanks, by armored cars and by some of the supply vehicles in the same area. The palette will therefore serve a whole group of vehicles of one front, not just one machine.

A small thing that settles the result: the width of the bands has to match the size of the machine. On a small armored car the same number of fields looks overdone compared with a tank, so with it the number of angled areas is better reduced.