How I Paint M81 Camo

 M81 is a pretty ubiquitous camo pattern, and has been used almost everywhere in the world by every imaginable faction in the past few decades. Even today it is popular with special forces and paramilitary. 

I have what I think is a pretty good method of getting consistent results, so I thought I'd share it (and preserve it as a reference fir myself). 

As always, I am mixing colors to get the tones I want. 

I think the key to getting the correct look is to always keep the colors cool by adding blue paint. The green should tend towards the blue/gray end of the spectrum. The tan should be just slightly blue as well. Finally, the brown should be closer to purple. 

Most modelers start with a green basecoat for M81, but this is wrong for two reasons. Looking closely you will see that the green is not the main color, and is instead integrated with the brown and beige in approximately equal portions. Secondly green is a dark tone, and will make the subsequent colors dark. This is why I follow a beige, brown, green process. 

So here is the step-by-step tutorial:

I basecoat the figure with flat white.

I then paint it overall in a beige color. This is a mix of tan, green, and blue, 

Next I paint in about 1/3 of the figure with brown spots. This should tend towards purple - mine is a mix of brown, red, and blue. 

I then paint in green. The green I used here is actually just a bit too green. I would tone it down just a little further with blue and tan. I also paint the ALICE webbing with the same color. 

Next, to tone everything down and unify the colors, I paint on a wash of flat tan. 

Then I paint on the black shapes. Keep these thin and use many branches. 

Finally, I highlight the webbing, and cut in the details with very thin black paint. 

Here are some results from previous blog posts. 

I hope this has been helpful. 

15mm US Army HMMWV Recon Platoon - WIP

 

I found a lot of 8 HMMWVs on Ebay for $25. These are normally $5 each from Irishserb, but have been out of production for a several months. I was pretty happy with the deal and decided to use them to expand my collection of US Army 1st Cavalry for 2004 Iraq. 

These are the first iteration of "up-armored" HMMWVs made in response to the atrocious losses suffered by the softskin HMMWVs in the beginning of the insurgency. They were still a pretty crap vehicle, but anyway.

3 turrets and 5 closed hatches were included in the lot. I wanted to use the turrets as well as open hatches. I had some spare open hatches from the Team Yankee of (softskin) HMMWVs and simply glued these on. I had a mix of gun shields from my spares box, but the result was a bit too "Mad Max" for my taste, so I made a template and cut the remaining shields out of tin from a kipper can. 

I full scout platoon will require two more HMMWVs, but I will add these at some later date. The actual platoon, as well as my unit here, are split half-and-half with M2 machine guns and Mk19 grenade launchers. I also attached some spare pieces that I will paint as AT4 rocket launchers - these are pretty common on HMMWV turrets. I also added lots of ammo boxes, as well as some stowage on the back that I will paint mostly as cardboard supply boxes. 

I added some shell casings to the tops of the vehicles, as I suspect that these would tend to pile up in a firefight. I will see how they look once painted. 

Finally, the crew are a mix of Team Yankee and some conversions based on ArmiesArmy brit bodies. Not perfect, but I think they'll work when painted. 

Thanks for looking. 

Turkish Special Forces and Arab Paramilitary

*Since there is understandably a lot of sensitivity around this topic, I an choosing to include this caveat to head off any unnecessary discussions. I am not "playing" with these figures; I am not glorifying this military unit; I am not making light of this atrocious conflict in general; I am a modeler. I model armies in miniature. I chose this unit to model because it is a challenge. The particular camouflage uniforms are difficult to paint well and the figures themselves required some modification in order to represent the appearance of the actual fighters. Comments making a big deal about this will be removed.*

Preface over. 

These figures represent FSA which has in recent years been shepherded by Turkish special forces advisors. A good representation of these units is not available with any single set of 15mm figures currently on the market, so I had to choose minis from several different manufacturers and modify some others. Most of the figures are from O8 miniatures (available in the US from PicoArmor) and Khurasan. The Turkish figures are Team Yankee Brits with Peter Pig heads. 

The camo is a mix of M81 woodland and Multicam. The Multicam was painted using the method I previously published (http://benssoldiers.blogspot.com/2016/12/painting-satisfactory-multicam.html).

Thanks for looking. I will be continuing my Early Medieval projects in the next update. Same geographic region, but 1000 years earlier ;)

 

Heavy Cavalry Troop pt 1: Maintenance platoon

I am slowly building a 15mm Heavy Cavalry troop for the 1st Cav that will work for the early 2000s.

I have all the tanks and troops I need, but still have to get a few more Brads and an M577 before the unit is finished.

The unit below is the freshly completed Maintenance platoon (HMMWV, M113, M88 Hercules, and two LMTVs). Since nobody makes the latter two vehicles in 15mm, I am using heavily converted Matchbox "grit spreaders" for the LMTVs and a mostly scratchbuilt (more like fudged) M88.

15mm US Army

I posted a single picture of these guys a while back in my Multicam tutorial post. I had planned to finish their vehicles before posting the rest of the pictures (a platoon of QRF strykers), but that's not going to happen, so here are the infantry.

The rest of my US Army collection are painted in desert DCUs, so their uses are limited to the early Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but as these are painted in Multicam, they can be used from about 2011 through the foreseeable future.

They are Khurasan's modern US figures with no modification.

Thanks for looking!

Afghan Army and US Special Forces

I just finished these two little units from Afghanistan.

The ANA commandos are conversions from Khurasan's new Syrian and Hezbollah sets, and the Special Forces are (mostly) conversions of Khurasan's Israelis. The HMMWVs are also Khurasan, while the pickups are Peter Pig and the MATVs are from Matchbox (with Corporal Overby tires added, among other upgrades).

Thanks for looking.

Another little NATO army...15mm

Latvia is admittedly a small country with a very small army, but when I recently read that they're purchasing a load of old CVRT series vehicles, I got interested in their modelling and gaming potential.

According to Wikipedia, they will be taking a total of 123 vehicles from the full CVRT series as part of a huge defense spending increase. 

Latvia also has equipped its regular infantry with new German G36 rifles and a funky digital camouflage that looks like scaled up MARPAT. 

This presented a problem for modelling, as I'm not satisfied with any of the modern Germans currently on the market. 

In the end, I used Eureka's modern Australians with heavily converted weapons. 

Here's the end result. Happy new year!