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So I'm attempting to make ghillie suits for my Catachan army. My first test suit was done on an Ogre (mostly because they are bigger and easier to work with). I'd love thoughts and critiques, and suggestions.

The technique I'm using for this is just putting the green stuff onto the back, spreading it to where I want it, and then using pressing a toothpick into it over and over again to create the effect. If you have suggestions on a better way to do this, I'd love to hear it. I'm also not sure on how much of the model I want to cover. I'd like to leave at least some of the model open for painting, but at the same time, I'm just painting it camo anyways. So if you have any thoughts about how much of the model to cover, I'd love to hear that, too.

Ive seen a couple companies have little leaf cutout punches maybe try make some leaves or something just to mkae it look less uniform

Looks pretty good, but seems like a ton of work. I've been working on trying different things as well, I had a marine scout I covered in a ghillie suit, it didn't look very good completely covered, so don't do that, have to have some of the model showing.

I found the best looking material was cheese cloth, can either airbrush it if you have one, or just use washes to dye it. You find some small leaves, static grass, etc to add to it, and should be good. I haven't had a chance to work on it in a while, but painting up some Catachans myself now, and will work on the Ghillie suit again when I have them done.

A while ago I attempted a ghillie suit type look on some 15mm Sci Fi figs I was painting. I used threads from gauze I had soaked in a solution of watered down white glue and different browns and greens.







The pieces of thread/gauze were probably too long to be in scale, but I was pretty happy with the over all effect.

I've seen cheese cloth and static grass/etc used to great effect on these forums before.

As for how much to cover...If you're going for honest to god realism, ghillie suits cover most of, if no the entire, body and often times most of the rifle (otherwise the rifle is visible...Which defeats the whole purpose). Google "ghillie suits" and go to image to see examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghillie_suit Keep in mind that in US military sniper school one of their last tests is that they must creep through a field, unseen by people who devote their life to teaching snipers and testing candidates, and hit a target next to a stand with those instructors on it.

Darknight: most of the work is actually mixing the green stuff the sculpting took maybe a minute. Which will still be well over an hour and a half if sculpting for the army! Is cheese cloth essentially gauze?

Troa: im familiar with real world applications of ghillie suits, its not just snipers that use them, even in the army. While covering the whole model would be realistic, its not practical for gaming. If the whole model including weapons was covered, you wouldnt be able to tell the differrence between models/units.

Jake: i thought about gauze, ended up buying something other than gauze and it didnt turn out right. Im personally not a fan of soak methids if painting, i like having more control.

Thanks for the comments, its appreciated!

Cheese cloth is like gauze, but not the same. It has a lot of different uses, I don't remember where I found the stuff I got, probably at walmart or hobby lobby. Worth getting and cheaper then all the green stuff you will need.

Do you soak just once with multiple colors in same pot? Or once per color?