• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.
What perfect colouring. I would have been eaten by it long ago.
 
It’s so well camouflaged I can’t find it, but then I couldn’t find the snake or owl from the previous page either.

Can someone indicate them under a spoiler for me?
 
20211120_163616.jpg

20211120_163713.jpg
 
These two are more difficult.

The owl is barely visible as an owl even when you see him. In fact, I'm only assuming this is the owl.
20211120_180743.jpg
And I'm still not sure where this snake's head is.

20211120_181014.jpg
 
These two are more difficult.

The owl is barely visible as an owl even when you see him. In fact, I'm only assuming this is the owl.
And I'm still not sure where this snake's head is.

Thanks for the leopard pointers. I’m still not seeing the owl or snake. I think I need an outline encompassing them.
 
I still can't see them either. Any of them. I feel like a kid back a school who just doesn't get what the teacher is explaining and who goes home baffled.
 
Thanks for the leopard pointers. I’m still not seeing the owl or snake. I think I need an outline encompassing them.
20211121_025113.jpg

20211121_025241.jpg
Unless there's an owl somewhere else, what I think is the owl is not so much camouflage as an owl in a dark hole in some rocks.

EDIT Before some smart alec says anything, the owl in the picture was an amateur impressionist doing a pair of tawny owls calling.
 
Last edited:
My goodness, I searched that picture pixel by pixel when it was posted and didn't see that. Cheeky little goit!
Hah! Seeing imaginary owls is the first sign of something or other..
 
Got him or her. At least OOP black leopards are easier to see. :)
 
The humble household moggy doesn't do badly in spite of domestication.

hint please? pretty please?
ha! got it! clever cat!
 
Last edited:
I have to confess the first time I looked at this picture I found the leopard, after a while. When I came back to it I couldn't find the bugger! It took me about ten minutes even though I knew (roughly) where it was.
 
1917. The USA has entered WW1. On the one hand, having observed three years of bloody ruinous war as a neutral, the US Army realises it has to upgrade its cavalry regiments to tanks and the age of the horse is gone, obselete in modern warfare. (And in a country like the USA, can you imagine the arguments that went on and the effort of will it must have taken to get over emotional attachment to horses, and to realise the Seventh Cavalry, for instance, should trade in its horses for tanks?)

The first FT-17 tanks were imports from France. Later, the USA contracted to licence-build them, with improvements, in the USA.

so, plus-side, the US Army realises it must modernise and have the best available tanks.

Downside.... this was the first attempt at a camoflage pattern. It's as if the psychedelic 1960's missed their cue and 1967 arrived fifty years too early. As if somebody explained the idea of disruptive cam, but didn't use any pictures.

1641810432761.png


This surviving example of the very first tank used by the US Army (Pennsylvania Military Museum) has since been renovated into a later cam scheme which retains the yellow base, but adds brown to the blue as a second cam colour: my guess is that the French reccomended "sand yellow" as a base colour for comoflage (a darker, mustardy, browner shade) but this either got lost in translation or the end-user just read it as "yellow" and reached, as per instructions, for yellow paint. (jaune sable - sand yellow; or else jaune foncé - dark yellow; what if the translator only saw jaune? Or somebody with the notes and an imperfect grasp of French read it as "fancy yellow"...)
1641811066246.png
 
Last edited:
It looks like morale boosting stony desert camo.
And the practical difficulty with camouflaging a tank is that, well, it's a tank. Hard to hide. I suspect that after a few weeks in the field, it's all going to be dulled down with a layer or two of mud and dust anyway - tankers throughout history have all discovered local mud works if you want to keep it under wraps till it's needed. (Afrika Korps got their tanks in European colour schemes, as did the British opposite. The British cam scheme in 1940-41 was even more bizarre and forced by necessity - massive paint shortages meant the Army had to go begging for Royal Navy and RAF surplus when all these spanking new but bright green tanks arrived in a desert in Egypt.) RAF sky-blue and navy battleship grey was used to add disruptive patterns...
1641867541943.png
 
Last edited:
And the practical difficulty with camouflaging a tank is that, well, it's a tank. Hard to hide. I suspect that after a few weeks in the field, it's all going to be dulled down with a layer or two of mud and dust anyway - tankers throughout history have all discovered local mud works if you want to keep it under wraps till it's needed. (Afrika Korps got their tanks in European colour schemes, as did the British opposite. The British cam scheme in 1940-41 was even more bizarre and forced by necessity - massive paint shortages meant the Army had to go begging for Royal Navy and RAF surplus when all these spanking new but bright green tanks arrived in a desert in Egypt.) RAF sky-blue and navy battleship grey was used to add disruptive patterns... View attachment 50538

The Caunter Scheme.

Don’t ever get into a discussion of its constituent colours with a keen modeller. You will be pinned to a wall until your ears shut down to protect your heart.

maximus otter
 
The Caunter Scheme.

Don’t ever get into a discussion of its constituent colours with a keen modeller. You will be pinned to a wall until your ears shut down to protect your heart.

maximus otter
As a keen modeller myself, don't I just know it. Lots of earnest discussions out there as to which of two barely distinguishable shades of Vallejo sand-yellow paint is right for, say, a mid-production-run Tiger tank in Novo Stalinskayapodmyshka on the evening of November 3rd 1942. My usual answer is "just paint it and if it looks right it is right" - but then that's heresy. Causes earache.

One of mine - apparently the precise shade of green was wrong for the Finnish front in winter of 1940 and in any case should have been overpainted, white as it was winter.....
1641895424410.jpeg
 
Last edited:
wth regard to seriously complicated cam paint schemes on tanks - this was one of my favourite model builds ever. The cam scheme on the Panzer IV is like scaled-up pointillism and took forever to get right. glad I did, though!

final Panzer IV GB 003.JPG

artwork 1.jpg
 
As a keen modeller myself, don't I just know it. Lots of earnest discussions out there as to which of two barely distinguishable shades of Vallejo sand-yellow paint is right for, say, a mid-production-run Tiger tank in Novo Stalinskayapodmyshka on the evening of November 3rd 1942. My usual answer is "just paint it and if it looks right it is right" - but then that's heresy. Causes earache.

One of mine - apparently the precise shade of green was wrong for the Finnish front in winter of 1940 and in any case should have been overpainted, white as it was winter.....
View attachment 50544

A proper modeller would paint it in authentic summer fashion and the overpaint it white so none of the original job is visible.

A lesser mortal would simply paint it white in the first place, but what if it ever got scratched at a convention and the truth got out?

Stuff of nightmares.
 
A proper modeller would paint it in authentic summer fashion and the overpaint it white so none of the original job is visible.

A lesser mortal would simply paint it white in the first place, but what if it ever got scratched at a convention and the truth got out?

Stuff of nightmares.
It's the difference between 100% period authenticity, and saying "the hell with that" and doing your own thing - artistic licence! Yup, the 1939-40 war between Finland and the USSR was fought in winter. This sort of dictates lots of white as a default camouflage scheme. But on the other hand, I really wanted a go at hand-painting the recognition insignia on that KV-2 tank. And the crucial thing about that air recognition painting is that it's in white. (the Red Air Force was intended to see the big white cross on the top of the tank turret and refrain from bombing. however, they failed to think the logic through and realise that a white cross on the top of a tank is a magnificent aiming mark for, eg, the Finnish Air Force.) So I hand-painted the white striping for the challenge of it. After that - no bloody way I'm repainting the whole thing in faded winter white.

Also, when the Russians invaded Eastern Poland in 1939, and over-ran the Baltic States to liberate them for the USSR, their armour was in standard green with air recognition devices painted on the upper surfaces... so, result... (Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, didn't have much in the way of Air Forces, and the Russians patiently waited for most of the Polish armed forces to have been lost to the Germans before they invaded).
 
Back
Top