Erbsenmuster Pea Dot Camouflage Figures Set

The dotted print of the last year of the war

The pea pattern, in German Erbsenmuster and in English-language writing pea dot or Dot 44, appeared in 1944 as the last major camouflage print introduced with Waffen-SS units. It was printed on the firm twill cloth of field uniforms, and it differed from the older patterns in one fundamental way: it stopped being reversible. The uniform was no longer turned inside out with the season, and the print stayed on the face side alone.

The motif consists of clusters of small round spots in rust, olive and dark brown, scattered over a lighter buff base. That is exactly what makes the pattern so treacherous to reduce in scale: at 1:35 the individual dots measure tenths of a millimeter, and a literal imitation comes out as dotted chaos.

A procedure that works

• lay down the buff base and let it dry through completely
• break up larger irregular islands of olive and darker brown
• dab the individual dots on with the tip of a brush or a piece of foam
• even the whole thing out with a weak glaze so that the pattern does not shout

The set belongs to a wider family of shades made exclusively for figures, in which equipment for the uniforms of the Allies and of the Axis stand side by side. The paints are acrylic and thinned with water, so they suit an airbrush as well as a brush, though on a figure in 1:35 you will do the overwhelming majority of the work by hand anyway. At the end it is worth unifying the finished character with a dark glaze into the folds: real printed cloth in the field was always noticeably more faded than a freshly painted model.