I feel your...

... angst. Over on '20mm Gamer', Nick Grant has posted on the agonies of getting German late war vehicle camouflage just right, in his post Panzer IV Tiger. Even the most relaxed war gaming modeller will have had some moments of doubt as they daubed German spots, dashes, stripes or blobs on their tanks and armour. I keep telling myself that I'm not a 'modeller' with a capital 'M', but someone who makes wargaming kit (which I, occasionally, very occasionally, game with), but I still worry. Look at the variety, particularly of colour and depth of colour in these random bits of my 1/76 stuff:

Above are two Frontline Hanomags. Good, basic wargame models in resin.

A pretty hefty, all metal Stug III from SHQ (I think); and below, another Frontline model, a late Pz III with 75mm :

The camouflage shapes on the Pz III were taken from photos of German armour in Norway after VE Day, while, below, this kit built (Fujimi ?) Hetzer sports one of a number of factory applied finishes for Hetzers (largely determined by which Czech factory made them).

The first problem is that, factory finishes apart, much late war German armour was given a basic ochre colour that appears in a remarkable range of yellowness in the colour plates of reference books. To add to that confusion, the red-brown and green was, as we are frequently told, applied in the field. That included application with brushes, rags, and just thrown on, with the paint diluted by the crew, using a variety of thinners, including petrol. Add to all that, wear and tear, fading, mud, dust, and the reasons behind the 20mm gamer's angst are clear and understandable. What is worse, sometimes a finish will somehow, in some magical 'mind's eye' way, just look 'right', but other paint jobs, in a similarly occult fashion, look all 'wrong'.

And it isn't just German armour! Below are a Loyalist light infantryman, and a British comrade. The various authorities in my AWI book collection note the variety of 'scarlet coats' in reality, so, for the Loyalist,  I gave him more of a rusty red 'scarlet' coat, whereas his British chum got bright red. 

I still can't decide which finish convinces me ... Nice figures, though.