Paint Set - Winter Camo

A winter coat was never white

Lime or chalk winter paint was mixed in a hurry at unit level during the war and behaved unpredictably in the frost. It rubbed off on edges, yellowed on flat surfaces, turned black around the engine bay from exhaust fumes, and after the first thaw only ragged patches were left of it, with the original color showing through underneath. That is exactly why you will never manage winter camouflage with a single white. You need a tone that dirties it, a tone that cools it and a tone that recalls what was underneath.

Six shades in the set

The set contains a white named Nuclear White, the cool gray Wolven Grey, the gray-green tone Field Grey-Green, the olive shade Overlord Olive, the muted khaki Gengis Khaki and the warm sepia brown Ancient Sepia. The trio of greens and khaki tones serves as a base, the white as an oversprayed coat, and the sepia suits a glaze into the gaps where grime and slushy snow gather.

A procedure that has proved itself

The base is sprayed in a muted green, and once dry the surface is gone over with chipping fluid or a thin layer of hair spray; only then does the white come. A damp brush is then used to break the coat up where the crew trod or branches scraped on the real machine. The paints are acrylic and water-thinnable, they can be applied with a brush or an airbrush and they mix with each other without restriction. On figures the same palette serves for winter capes and furs, where the white works as the highest light and the sepia as the shadow in deep folds. Leftover snow in a diorama then only needs tuning with a glaze of the lightest shade, so that the icy surface does not look like plaster.