MULTICAM CAMOUFLAGE SET

The MultiCam palette

MultiCam was designed by the American company Crye Precision as a pattern meant to work everywhere: in dry country, in vegetation and in built-up areas. Instead of hard-edged blotches it works with smooth transitions between earth and green tones, so the outline of a figure breaks up even when the background changes several times in a single day. Since its use in Afghanistan it has spread into the kit of a whole range of armies and is today one of the most frequently modeled present-day patterns of all.

The six bottles match the individual layers of the drawing:

• Light Sand to the FS-33727 standard as the lightest base of the whole pattern.
• Yellow Green FS-34259 and Pure Green for the green component.
• Brown Base FS-30108 and Light Brown for the brown stripes and blotches.
• Mid Grey FS-36357 for the gray transitions and for shading the folds.

Restraint pays off

The range chosen is meant for painting figures: it holds on small areas, it can be glazed and it does not fill engraved detail in. On a figure, though, the pattern is practically never painted literally. The more sensible approach is to lay a light base down, rough in two or three of the largest fields and only then add a few small blotches where the light falls. Anyone who tries to copy the whole drawing will get nothing but a gray-green smear in a small scale. The darkest of the tones sits best thinned to a glaze and run only into the shaded folds of sleeves and trouser legs, where it works as shadow and deepens the drawing of the pattern at the same time.