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Going to be painting up haqqislam for infinity soon in desert colours and camo. Does anyone have any tips on how do do this, particularly in enough reds to actually painting this kind of camo And how to paint a model in several similar colours without obscuring the models detail.

The kind of looks I am aiming for are below.

How to Paint Desert Camouflage: http://youtu.be/5ZG8So2tcEg
Sadly, the whole point of camo is to obscure detail. My reccomendation is to lay down the cammo, seal it with some gloss finish, then make a wash using heavily watered down ink (think 10-15:1) and a drop or two of flow aid. A sepia or brown ink should do the trick nicely with the above tutorial.

You can download stencils and print them on vinyl. I would recommend youtube chanel "Buypainted" or try to search for some gundam camo tutorials on youtube, they are useful, or old good brushwork.

gealgain makes the good point that camo is intended to obscure details and a tabletop model is intended to make the details plainly visible in a small size. Thus there is a conflict. The solution is to paint a camo scheme that looks realistic at model scale while actually being too prominent at its scale size to work in real life. This can be done partly by choosing colours that contrast more than the real life colours, and partly by exaggerating the size of the pattern.

Disregarding "digital" camo, desert camo is the usual disruptive profile kind of pattern of three or four overprinted colours. Typically a pale tan, a reddish-brown and a dark brown or black. It depends on the colour of the desert. There are red, yellow, grey and for all I know other colours of desert considering alien worlds.

The best thing is to look up real world desert camo patterns on Google, and work out a simplified scheme that can be painted in three or four stages. The modern British Army has settled on a standard camo pattern using brown shades that work in nearly any terrain, so that could be a good basis.

Stage one is the palest base colour. You then daub the medium colour, and finally the darkest colour so there will be some overlaps.

If doing a four colour scheme it normally has a base colour, a mid colour and pale chips with dark shadows. In this case paint the base followed by the mid, the the palest colour and finally dab in the shadows around the pale chips. Some of them use four colours in overlapping daubs, in which case follow the same technique as the three colours scheme but use four more contrasting colours.

here are a couple of examples of different syles of camo i have done...

the first ones are very simple two color desert camo...
super easy to do, and the pattern still stands out on a small mini...

the second is the standard woodland btu style, with the colors of the pattern done a bit more extreme to stand out...

the third is digi-camo, but with the shapes used very sparingly, so it doesn't just look like a bunch of tiny dots...










let me know if you have any specific questions about any of these ideas...
i hope that helps...

cheers
jah

I love the way you did the last two.

cool...

the colors, of course, can be switched out for whatever you like...
it was more about showing the different patterns...
there is also about 6 years of developing my skill set between the painting of the Rezolution minis, and the Infinity ones...

there is a nice little tutorial, on the Studio McVey blog, about how Ali did the camo on her version of Kara...

http://studiomcvey.blogspot.mx/2009/12/painting-camo.html

good luck...

cheers
jah

I remember doing a commission once for some modern day Empress minis.
He'd sent tonnes of source material and I told him it would look like a mess on the table to paint them 'exactly like that'.
I painted one 'the wargaming way' and one 'exactly like that', he chose the wargaming way.

I've been hunting through my computer for 20 mins now and can't find the images anywhere!

Thanks for all your help so far guys. Yah I figured that camo as it's meant to look would look awful on the model itself.

If you do come across that picture alex I would love to see it.