Preparing to paint my Americans

With a large bunch of 6mm Americans sitting here to be painted up as the 3rd Infantry Division (kindly organised for me late last year by Luke Ueda-Sarson) I've started doing a bit of research on how to go about the task.

The first thing I need to look at is colour schemes.

The infantry wore OG-107 utilities at this period, so they will be undercoated an appropriate drab green and washed and highlighted as needed.  The colour should look something like this, though there would be variation due to wear and tear, exposure to sunlight, etc.

Image from this website: http://armynavyuniforms.com/index.php?main_page=page_2

The vehicles however used the MERDC patterning - a much tougher proposition.  I will need a forest green, field drab, and black camouflage design, as described here, in proportions of 45%, 45%, 5% and 5% respectively.  Colours are from the Urban's Colour charts site.

 This is the forest green.

And this one is also mentioned in some sources.

 This is the field drab.

 This is Rhys Batchelor's recommendation for the field drab colour.

 This is the sand colour...

...and another variation on the sand colour.

And of course, the black.














The panzerbaer website here is a great resource for Cold War vehicles, as this image taken from the site shows:

Image URL: http://www.panzerbaer.de/colours/a_relaunch/us_merdc_apc_m113.htm

As are these sites recommended by chaps on the Spearhead yahoo group: merdccamo and armouredacorn.

Thanks to tips from various websites I also managed to track down a very useful PDF which gives paint patterning details for most of the vehicles I'll be needing to do, so there's no excuse now; I just need to match colours to locally available paints and get cracking!

Hopefully there will be more to follow on this in the not-too-distant future...