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Camouflage Reference and Stencils

A long time ago I’ve prepared a reference pack to download with a name Camouflage and actually I have forgotten about it. Last week I’ve received an email from one subscriber named Marc. He was asking about digital camouflage stencils. So I jumped on that topic and decided to create a few stencils. After some time spent creating them I realized I’ve had reference material, so I decided to add that to today’s article too. But what kind of article would it be if it had just pictures.

Today I’m going to include some preview of references with option to download, also a preview of stencils with the option to download and at last some description, recommendations, “how to”, history and a very useful links that will help you with everything around this type of painting.

I don’t know if any of airbrush artists will profit from this but a lot of modelers will do for sure.

A Few Words about Camouflage

The interesting fact is that camouflage has been a topic of interest in biology for over a century. Even Charles Darwin’s theory included features as camouflage. Darwin wrote:

“When we see leaf-eating insects green, and bark-feeders mottled-grey; the alpine ptarmigan white in winter, the red-grouse the color of heather, and the black-grouse that of peaty earth, we must believe that these tints are of service to these birds and insects in preserving them from danger. Grouse, if not destroyed at some period of their lives, would increase in countless numbers; they are known to suffer largely from birds of prey; and hawks are guided by eyesight to their prey, so much so, that on parts of the Continent persons are warned not to keep white pigeons, as being the most liable to destruction. Hence I can see no reason to doubt that natural selection might be most effective in giving the proper color to each kind of grouse, and in keeping that color, when once acquired, true and constant.”

Or for example the artist Abbott Handerson Thayer formulated “Thayer’s Law“, the principle of counter-shading.

Edward Bagnall Poulton studied animal coloration (19th century), especially camouflage and its different usages like by prey to hide from predators and by predators to approach prey.

A British zoologist Hugh Bamford Cott worked to convince the British army to use more effective camouflage techniques, including counter-shading. In 1940 he wrote a book “Adaptive Coloration in Animals” where he created a concept as “maximum disruptive contrast“, where “a streak of boldly contrasting color helps to make an animal or military vehicle less visible by breaking up its outline“.

There are many types of camouflage. I thought that there are 4 or so types but if you go to this wiki page you can find that it does depend for what part of the world you need this camouflage and there is a lot of them. You will also find some references there. It is a very good wiki page therefore I recommend it highly to everyone interested in camouflages.

Have you heard the term “Digital Camo“? It is probably the youngest type of the camouflage. The company behind it is HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp. This company was established in 1999 and they developed first “Passive Negative Ion Generator”. This company took it further and began to develop new military camouflage based on mathematical fractals (feedback loops) taking camouflage into an area of science (unbelievable!).

After I’ve read about generator I found out that there is online DIY Stencil generator for camouflages. Well the thing is that you can generate any pattern you want and choose colors you want but then if you want the real stencil you’ll have to buy it (I don’t know anything about the quality of it).

I think that it is worth to mention here that our friends from airsick stencils have camouflage stencils in their shop too and I can guarantee the quality of all of their stencils – they are the best. At the moment we are working on a review of their stencils and very soon we’ll publish it so stay with us.

You can always do everything by yourself, that’s why I prepared the material below.

Camouflage Reference

Here is some preview from the pack.

Camouflage Stencils

It took me much more time to prepare these stencils comparing to the pack above. This is just a preview.

Here is the link (ge.tt) to one of the stencils. In order to get access to the rest you have to be a subscriber (it is totally free) and you can have the stencil ready to print in your favorite program.

BTW, if you are newbie at this and don’t exactly know how to use the stencil to paint camouflage I found this site very useful and informative. Also there is a lot of videos on YouTube walking you through all the process.

I want to thank Marc for giving me the idea for writing this article. If you find this useful as I do please share or like or at least leave a comment.

Leave a Comment

4 Comments on “Camouflage Reference and Stencils”

  • Thank you Sergej for following up on my suggestion. Stencils are great, good job. Here’s one, you can print it and cut with an exacto or even reduce it’s size and you can camo-paint a plastic model pretty easily.

    Marc AKA Mack Jigger

  • That is too cool so I had to tweet about it.