Painting Caunter with Vallejo colours

The British early desert war Caunter pattern is an attractive one on the wargames table, but it is truly a pain in the arse to paint. All of the borders between the colours have to be dead straight, or else it looks like pants.

I've tried masking and spraying it, but on these little rivet-covered models that is extremely troublesome, and the easiest method I've found is just to use a long-haired lettering brush to outline the areas of colour, and then to just colour them in with a regular #1 round brush.

There is, apparently, a very good Caunter set of acrylics available from a manufacturer whose name escapes me right now, but I don't have access to those.

NOTE: Vallejo also now produces a Caunter set of ModelAir paints, which I'm trying to get my hands on

The paints I do have access to are Vallejo. My local model shop keeps good stocks of them, and I can generally be confident of getting the colours I want. In truth, the ready availability of Vallejo paints has made me pretty lazy about mixing up my own colours.

The model shown above, a PSC 1:100 (15mm) A9 cruiser, is painted in a combination of the two colour sets I've laid out here in my modelling notebook.

The base colour (Portland Stone) is VMC 847 Dark Sand,  which is a little too dark on its own, so I've highlighted and panel-toned it with VGC 034 Bone White.

NOTE: Vallejo now produces more accurate ModelAir mixes for Portland Stone (71.288) and Light Stone (71.143).

The middle tone (Silver Grey) is VMC 844 Stone Grey. VMC 886 Grey Green is OK, but it looks a bit too dark to my eye on its own. I've tried painting it in 886 and then lightening it with 844, but there didn't seem to be much, if any benefit over going straight to 844. In fact, the best colour I've come up with so far is a 50/50 mix of 886 and 844.

The darkest tone (Slate Grey) is VMC 830 German Field Grey. If you want a faded effect on a well-used vehicle, a 50/50 mix of 830 and 886 works well.

The keen-eyed amongst you will have noticed that there is not a blue paint to be seen anywhere. The idea that Caunter included a blue seems to have been propagated from a an erroneous scheme devised in the 1960s — apparently the Silver Grey could fade to what appeared to be a bluish shade in certain lights, but it certainly didn't start out that way.