WIP Thinking of a redo on this Ray lamb Dragoon

[Einion]

Ron, up to a point I'm also of the opinion that older pieces shouldn't be stripped and repainted for the reason Adrian mentions, they're good landmarks of your progress.

But past a certain point - where you no longer need to be reassured that you are making progress - I think it can be worth doing, for the fresh challenge, to see what you can do with the older figure now with all you've learned in the intervening years. Especially for OOP kits, where realistically you'd have little or no chance of acquiring another copy then it's strip or you won't get to paint it again.

Given how well this is painted currently, I'd be torn about a strip and repaint myself, but if you really want to paint the kit again... and you have permanently recorded the previous paintjob, so it's not going to be completely lost to history.

Einion

 

[Einion]

Gentlemen,
Concerning the 'true shade of Dragoon Green', I'm reminded what the late great, Col. Elting told about the subject. While looking at an original French Dragoon uniform on a manequin while at the Napoleonic Conference in Memphis years ago, he stated the the French actually had to dye the uniforms first, in yellow then second, in blue (or vice versa) in order to get French Dragoon Green. They apparently (?) lacked a good green dye. One must be mindful that they used vegetable based dyes and not the colorfast dyes of today. I, myself, am as oy yet undecided as to what shade to choose.

This same point has been raised here a couple of times in relation to period fabrics, that they didn't have access to a suitable green dye (to produce a deep colour in large quantity) so woad over weld, indigo over fustic would have been the way to achieve this.

We need to accept that there is no one correct shade for any uniform colour ('uniform' ); even today the variation from one piece to another can be very great, as members who were or are in the armed forces have attested!

Given the huge variation in colour that indigo alone is capable of achieving, the possible range of colour for the green is pretty vast - from very dark and bluer in hue to something lighter and greener, and anything in between, they're all feasible. And that's before wear, light exposure, dirt and washing took their toll. So it unfortunately comes down largely to personal taste, even for those striving for to be as historically accurate as they can.

Einion