Studies in Urban Camouflage

Necromunda has somewhat taken over the game room of late.  I have augmented the box set terrain with my old 20mm ruins I built for WWII Para action years ago (They are all that is left of the "St. Lo down dirty shame" games I ran at Enfilade around 2000 -2001.)

My collection of Necromunda minis is very limited. A quick scan on-line revealed some jaw-dropping prices for old models.  I therefore decided to get some GW Space Marines on the cheap and use the opportunity to empty out some of my 20+ year old bits from the bits box.

The Boy has no idea of the fluff and history of Warhammer 40K, and I have no interest past anything GW did with it after 1995....  Thus, I decided to paint these guys however I saw fit.  Given my trials at doing patterns with Harlequins last month, I decided to make some different attempts at Urban camouflage patterns.  I decided to paint up fire teams of five models each, so it presents the opportunity to try different techniques.

First up I wanted to try to replicate the UK's cold-war era "Berlin Brigade" urban pattern.  The disjointed use of three color rectangles was a very unique pattern and visually interesting.  It also presents the challenge for me to work on my line painting.  (A task made harder by the curved surfaces of the shoulder pads.)  The pattern started with a Leather Brown base, with blocks done in Uniform Grey, Ash Grey, German Grey Black and Ivory.  Most of the metal work was done by mixing Flat Black with Vellajo "Metal Medium"  which is some awesome stuff.  The end product looks more like real gun metal and less like the dark steel/silver metallic GW seems to favor.  

I tried a little more traditional Urban pattern on the chainsword, but wasn't really sold on it for a full figure pattern.

Next up I wanted to try a more modern "brush" pattern, I cut an old 01 brush short to create a small stippling brush and went over a Uniform Gray basecoat with successive layers of Ash grey, Grey Black, Wool and Ivory.  The results are realistic, but very subtle at this scale.  

Terminator against the Necromunda terrain.

Against some old GW plastic terrain.  

I really liked the overall effect of this technique but it does suffer from being so subtle.  When viewed from more than a foot it just looks like mottled grey.  I am going to try this technique next to get something similar to multi-cam or OCP and see how it works out.    Now for some obligatory eye candy:

Three armored infantry patrol the ruins.  

The locals have prepared a welcoming committee

The built up area do not support armored operations, so they have taken to using a heavy armored infantry soldier to fill the assault gun role.