Crazyredcoat's Crazy Compendium of Collected Creativity
The Blanco Problem
A long time ago (well maybe a year or two), I started painting some of my British Bolt Action chaps. Being the uniform buff that I am, I looked into all sorts of stuff and came to the conclusion that the webbing would have been beige in colour…so I painted a whole bunch of my guys like that. Then I read about the blanco they would put on to protect the material from the elements, and that turned the beige webbing into a green colour. A boo-boo had been made. I’ve done a few experiments in the past to fix this, but they were using the stock I had on hand and it just wasn’t the right kind of green. So what to do?
Ignoring the Yank on the left, you can see the colours quite well (this is a definite Osprey image, but the exact book I am unsure of by the by). The slight problem I have is that I have been making my experiments on some troops I am using for the Far East, so the uniform itself is also green, which is a difficult colour to match. Point being, the colour here is more green than brown in hue, so how can I change that on my currently beige minis?The first test was on my 6pdr gun. Now when I painted this originally, the crew were not attched to the base and pulling them off would have been problematic, so I was looking for a simple way to change the colour with little effort. Previous experiments had shown that shades of light colours can do a lot to change a colour quickly, so that was my first test.
The above picture is the initial colour, the lower is after a coat of Biel-Tan Green over the webbing. It is not perfect, but it is quick and simple. The great advantage to Bolt Action stuff is that a few colour variations don't matter so much as there would have been variations due to application, wear, and manufactoring quality...which helps.The next idea was repainting. For obvious reasons, this is not the most endearing of ideas, but my mini of Maj. James Rutherford-Lumley was fairly well posed to make getting to the webbing not too hard. I do like the colour I got here. In many ways it is a closer uniform colour than the darker green I have here, but I’m going to invoke the ‘colour variation is ok’ from above and also the rule on contrast. There needs to be some difference between the two items to make them stand out. This is subtle here, but would be much less so if I went to 100% accurate colours all round. Imagine the tunics and such are wet.
Paint pots are shown for colours at each step. Also accidental Lloyd shots (the webbing is more visiable at this angle). I like the way this looks a bit more than the speedy method, but repainting is going to be tedious...While the colour is better on the repainted webbing, I do not want to try and redo all my webbing on 15 or so minis, so I will use the shading method to redo (eventually) and stick to the slower method for all new projects, the first of which should be coming soon with a NW Europe theatre Rupert coming shortly! I also really quite like that green for a camo colour, too, so maybe a Panzer IV may make an appearance soon…
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