WOODLAND & FLECKTARN CAMOUFLAGE

Two camouflage patterns, one palette

German Flecktarn and American Woodland both grew out of the same idea: to break up the outline of a figure with clusters of irregular patches that the eye does not join into a continuous shape. Woodland entered service with the US Army at the beginning of the 1980s and works with four large fields that overlap one another. Flecktarn takes the opposite route, a fine dotted raster in which the patches merge only at a distance. The Bundeswehr introduced it across the board after the reunification of Germany and it is still worn today.

What the palette consists of

• A light green for the lightest fields of the pattern
• A medium green as the main area
• A brown-black for the darkest patches and shadows
• A transitional green for soft joins between tones
• A sand shade for the base and the light areas
• A red-brown for the brown fields and for items of equipment

A procedure that works

A continuous base goes down first, and only then come the individual patches, working from the larger areas to the small details. With Flecktarn the size of the dots is decisive: in the small scales it is advisable to simplify the pattern, because a raster copied literally merges into an indeterminate gray. Woodland, on the other hand, will take fields running across seams and pockets in one piece. The brown-black tone also suits outline shading of the folds, which gives a figure depth.

Where else the palette will serve

The green and sand tones are not tied to these two patterns alone. They come into their own on a backpack, a sleeping bag, a tarpaulin over a load and on camouflage netting thrown over a vehicle, that is, everywhere the color is meant to be military but not machine-uniform. The paints are thinned with water or with a thinner intended for the purpose and will take both brush and airbrush; for the small patches a thin brush with a firm point is usually more convenient.