IDF UNIFORM COLORS

Israeli uniforms in two settings

The set of six acrylic paints is put together for figures of the Israeli army, and for two different settings at once. The first trio builds the olive green field uniform of the kind seen in pictures from the fighting in Sinai and on the Golan Heights. The second aims at the sand and canvas shades of later decades, when lighter uniforms for a dry environment came to the fore.

The logic of the selection

This is not a random collection of tones but two trios built as base, light and shadow. The middle green serves as the flat area, the olive as the lit part and the field brown-gray as the shadow. The same is repeated in the light branch, where the base is a canvas shade and the light an ocher khaki. The sixth bottle, with a brown-black paint, closes both branches and belongs on boots, straps and the deepest folds.

Working with the shades

• Paint the flat area in one color and add the light only once it has dried; the transition is then easier to control.
• Do not use the brown-black as a pure black, as it looks too hard on cloth.
• The same tones hold up on backpacks, bags and tarpaulins loaded on a vehicle.
• The light branch benefits from a warmer undercoat than the one used beneath a green uniform.

The package is meant above all for figure painters. It also serves well where only a few figures have to be added to a vehicle model and buying the shades one bottle at a time makes no sense. The split into two branches also means that two differently dated scenes can be built from a single package.