Camouflage

[Optimist]

I think this is exactly why the US military initially adopted M81 Woodland (a personal favorite of mine) which is an enlarged version of ERDL.

Woodland seems to run into this same problem, at least according to Wikipedia:

The effect of enlarging the pattern was to make the pattern more visible at a distance, avoiding "blobbing", where smaller areas of color seem to blend into larger blobs. This also gave the pattern a higher contrast, making it stand out more sharply at close distances and defeating the camouflage effect at closer range. Digital and Flecktarn camouflage patterns resolve this problem by using a range of blob sizes to give a similar effect whatever the distance.

What's confusing to me is the above makes it sound like M81 Woodland fails at all ranges, right? The plains of Europe would make it more visible at a distance, and close-up use in a forest would make it more visible, too? Doesn't make sense. It should either be great at long distance and poor at close distance, or vise versa.

It can't suck at all distances. I won't allow it. All my inna woods gear is M81 woodland!

If I'm reading it right what they mean by "make the pattern more visible at distance" is that the pattern still works at distance, instead of blobbing into single color, but isn't as good at close range because of the high contrast large blobs.

I also have a soft spot for M81 Woodland, having been born in the 80s. I think it's too dark for where I live, but I was thinking about adding some Arcturus Laser-Cut Leaf Strips in Summer Green during the summer taking it off and putting on something similar in white in the winter.

An interesting video series I saw on the history of M81 Woodland (I think it was on the Uniform History Youtube channel, you might have seen the same thing) was that going from ERDL to M81 they intentionally made the whole pattern darker than what they wanted because they noticed manufacturers tended to dye colors lighter when doing huge runs and also the pattern would fade with time.

Have you seen the ones where they use the liquid dish soap yet?

Yeah, those ones are fun to watch!

[JeeperCreeper]

For a year or two now I've been watching rifle painting videos for fun. There's something about them that scratches the same itch as acrylic pour painting videos.

Have you seen the ones where they use the liquid dish soap yet?

I'm gonna be a hipster about this.... My brother showed me surf dudes doing their boards with dish soap a few years ago. My first thought went to camo for guns because the laundry bag is way played out.

I found no camo threads on the internet about dish soap camp on any forum, blog, or reddit.

So I played around with it...

Now, you're seeing it start to pop up on reddit, Facebook groups, and forums.

I'm mad at myself for not doing YouTube videos and stuff about it so I could say "look at me, I'm first!!"

I'm going to start doing designs with Vaseline.

You heard it here first! Rattle can Vaseline gun camo!!!!

[echo83]

I think this is exactly why the US military initially adopted M81 Woodland (a personal favorite of mine) which is an enlarged version of ERDL.

Woodland seems to run into this same problem, at least according to Wikipedia:

The effect of enlarging the pattern was to make the pattern more visible at a distance, avoiding "blobbing", where smaller areas of color seem to blend into larger blobs. This also gave the pattern a higher contrast, making it stand out more sharply at close distances and defeating the camouflage effect at closer range. Digital and Flecktarn camouflage patterns resolve this problem by using a range of blob sizes to give a similar effect whatever the distance.

What's confusing to me is the above makes it sound like M81 Woodland fails at all ranges, right? The plains of Europe would make it more visible at a distance, and close-up use in a forest would make it more visible, too? Doesn't make sense. It should either be great at long distance and poor at close distance, or vise versa.

It can't suck at all distances. I won't allow it. All my inna woods gear is M81 woodland!

If I'm reading it right what they mean by "make the pattern more visible at distance" is that the pattern still works at distance, instead of blobbing into single color, but isn't as good at close range because of the high contrast large blobs.

Got it. Yeah, that makes way more sense. Instead of seeing a formation of obviously human-shaped olive drab lumps approaching from a distance, the individual colors are still intact and work to break up the contour. 

On a kind-of related note, I wonder why so few people take a page from the IDF handbook and use solid olive drab as a primary uniform. The history behind it is pretty interesting; olive drab works well enough with their environment, is cheaper to manufacture, and helps the Israelis differentiate their own units from enemy units, which all use patterned camouflage. 

There are some exceptions, like the mitznefet ("chef's hat") but plain olive drab seems most common. 

[MacWa77ace]

For a year or two now I've been watching rifle painting videos for fun. There's something about them that scratches the same itch as acrylic pour painting videos.

Have you seen the ones where they use the liquid dish soap yet?

I'm gonna be a hipster about this.... My brother showed me surf dudes doing their boards with dish soap a few years ago. My first thought went to camo for guns because the laundry bag is way played out.

I found no camo threads on the internet about dish soap camp on any forum, blog, or reddit.

So I played around with it...

Now, you're seeing it start to pop up on reddit, Facebook groups, and forums.

I'm mad at myself for not doing YouTube videos and stuff about it so I could say "look at me, I'm first!!"

I'm going to start doing designs with Vaseline.

You heard it here first! Rattle can Vaseline gun camo!!!!

The thing about dish soap is it cleans off easily.

[Optimist]

There's certain types of hairspray that are used in a similar way to the dish soap for painting models. Not sure how well it would work for rifles.

[JeeperCreeper]

There's certain types of hairspray that are used in a similar way to the dish soap for painting models. Not sure how well it would work for rifles.

I'm gonna hafta dig into that.

Elmer's glue is another I've been seeing popping up.

I bet there might even be some modelling clay as well.

Things that stick, but easy to clean up

[Optimist]

Another thing frequently used in model painting is silly putty. It's easy to stick down (especially on uneven surfaces), easy to peel back off without removing paint and can be reused. Sometimes I see people using stickers and once they get several layers of stickers and paint in it is hard to remove the first layers. Not a problem with silly putty.

Of course silly putty is hard to do crisp edges with, so if someone wanted to replicate a digital pattern stickers still have a place.

[MacWa77ace]

There's certain types of hairspray that are used in a similar way to the dish soap for painting models. Not sure how well it would work for rifles.

I'm gonna hafta dig into that.

Elmer's glue is another I've been seeing popping up.

I bet there might even be some modelling clay as well.

Things that stick, but easy to clean up

If you're going to spend money, there's spray on, and paint on, or stick on 'masking' material you can get at an artstore. But its not as cheap as dish soap, mesh bags or leaves. And it takes more work. These other techniques are cheap and fast and effective.

https://www.paintingwithwatercolors.com/2012/02/art-masking-fluid/

[flybynight]

Interesting.


https://youtu.be/qm44zLdi5O8?si=7P6KjH1s2Eb02Yv0

[Optimist]

There is a brief period of a couple weeks where the snow is nearly all gone but the leaves haven't come out yet. That's the one time of year where brown is actually pretty common in my area. In the fall there is also more brown but still a lot of greens all the way until the snow starts piling up (and also a bunch of yellow and a little red/orange in the fall).

Took a little hike through the woods the other day. This is the brownest area I could find. It's looking down from the top of a little ridge.

Someone in head-to-toe green would stand out pretty bad there.

Here's what things tend to look like from the side like normal, rather than looking down from a vantage point:


I don't think it's worth having much in the way of brown stuff just because it's such a brief period, but maybe it would be worth having some brown strips of cloth in an appropriate color to tie on, especially as a lot of the brown come from leaves which don't seem like they would be easy to stick on your stuff
 

[Crimson_Phoenix]

Back when I lived in AZ, and now that I'm back again, I thought the Gulf War era chocolate chip desert camo with either OD or woodland gear worn over it was about the best for my environment. Nowadays, 6 color, 3 color, or multicam with either OD or coyote brown gear seems to work just fine. I collect Cold War and early GWOT era uniforms and equipment and used to airsoft, so it got frustrating when I'd butt heads with folks who were overly focused on recreating a specific special unit's attire and equipment instead of focusing on what worked for the location, season, and weather. Typically the only person who had snivel gear or carried enough water and refused to drop hundreds of dollars on equipment just to make it "look right." At the same time, I wore the same equipment and uniforms I wore as a Cadet and worked out my needs for hours long events and tailored my gear to that. Got some really strange but positive comments about my 1980s/90s "Ranger" kit. I was no ranger. lol

[Dabster]

Time to resuscitate this thread!

I was aimlessly scrolling through news on camouflage and I saw two interesting tidbits:

• I think we have all seen Russian troops wearing a lot of ATACS-FG. I assumed we were seeing a huge copyright infringement but I saw somewhere that Russia bought rights to ATACS-FG and were attempting to be the sole supplier. Nothing of this mentioned here: https://www.a-tacs.com/our-patterns. Has anyone heard anything about this?
• Someone, I suspect Russians, has made an arid/grassland version of ATACS. They're calling it Eastern ATACS.
  

     Seems to be a nice compromise between ATACS AU and ATACS FG.

[JeeperCreeper]

Time to resuscitate this thread!

I was aimlessly scrolling through news on camouflage and I saw two interesting tidbits:

• I think we have all seen Russian troops wearing a lot of ATACS-FG. I assumed we were seeing a huge copyright infringement but I saw somewhere that Russia bought rights to ATACS-FG and were attempting to be the sole supplier. Nothing of this mentioned here: https://www.a-tacs.com/our-patterns. Has anyone heard anything about this?
• Someone, I suspect Russians, has made an arid/grassland version of ATACS. They're calling it Eastern ATACS.
  

    Seems to be a nice compromise between ATACS AU and ATACS FG.

I really like ATACS patterns, just can't find too many quality manufacturers anymore. 

Also reminds me of the Turkish Air Force camp that last got imported and being peddled by Americana Pipedream 

[Crimson_Phoenix]

Does anybody know if Camo Distributors still exists? There used to be a few storefronts on eBay. They were usually of similar quality to TruSpec and Propper and still made patterns discontinued by both, like 6 color desert and subdued urban camo in ripstop. I can't find anything on them now.