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The ancients liked colour. Dyes and paints were a luxury, especially so for the most vibrant ones. Rather much of the finer ancient stoneworks were decorated with at least some spots of colour in their heyday. I think we as wargaming hobbyists can sympathize with this: Would you rather have grey plastic or a painted army?

Here are some painted runestones (originals and replicas alike), to replicate how they might have looked like:





Ölsta Stone




Jelling Stone






Uncovered in S:t Paul's Churchyard, London




From a festival, check out IlmarinenKowal's gallery



Just something to keep in mind for scenery and Hold Guardian painting.

I'm currently producing the maps for a colleague's monograph on Swedish, Irish, and Scottish runestones but I wasn't aware of any painted ones - that said, I'm a Near Easternist and am just doing it for some extra work so I'm no specialist in 1st millennium Western Europe.

I think we get a bit carried away about the potential vibrancy* on ancient colour use, though. Whilst major projects in major cities were likely quite bright, producing bold pigments was extraordinarily expensive and rare or unknown in many regions through most of history. There's a project at Glasgow just now examining pigments on the Antonine Wall distance slabs, for instance, which is primarily discovering a whole host of varients of reddish-brown.

*In relative terms, anyway. In what was a world far less full of bright colours, things that today we'd see as somewhat dull could be understood as a very striking .