Hooah soldier! Welcome to the first Colour of the Month article, where we take a look at not a particular paint, but rather an entire colour family. In this case we’re exploring a desaturated green, olive green, or military green; whatever you choose to call it, I think you get the idea. A colour that would look equally at home on a soldier’s fatigues or a lizard’s scales.
This simple idea of a colour actually branches out into many of our paint ranges, providing you with plenty of opportunities and options to choose from when it comes to painting your minis.
Colour Primer
We have to start with the most obvious choice, and, what would be the first layer in any army that features a lot of this colour, the Army Green Colour Primer. If you need to knock out a ton of tanks, high-tech military operatives, or particularly drab orcs all at once, you can’t go wrong with this Colour Primer. It’s even colour matched to paint within our Warpaints Air and Warpaints Fanatic ranges, meaning you’ll have close matches once you go in with a brush to touch up any mistakes.
Warpaints Fanatic
With 216 paints to pick from, it would be criminal to not have a good selection of drab greens in the mix. Luckily for us, we won’t need to fork up any bail money as the Fanatic range features not one, not two, but six colours that fit the bill perfectly. In fact, they’re all organized into a handy Flexible Triad. The Olive Greens Flexible Triad to be exact. These paints range from the dark Woodland Camo up to the very bright Grotesque Green, making sure you’ll never have to guess which colour to shade or highlight with next.
Warpaints Air
Not to be left out, the Warpaints Air range has its own triad of olive green colours in the form of Militia Green, Army Green, and Drab Green. Using this trio of paints, you’ll be sure to get smooth and even gradients when airbrushing as you go from dark to light. Our very own Tyler Mengel used this exact combo of paints to get the bulk of his tanks’ armour done for his 2024 Arena of Escalation Astra Militarum army, and even used Militia Green as the main colour for the armour of his troops. You can check out a tutorial showing you how to muster your own unit of guardsmen in his colour scheme here.
Speedpaint
If you want to paint your models in a hurry, or just want to speed up the basecoating process, then Speedpaint has you covered. Gunner Camo, Camo Cloak, Algae Green, and Ochre Clay could all be said to fall within the olive-green category to varying degrees of saturation and brightness. These paints allow you to knock out a shadow, mid-tone, and highlight all in one go when painted over a brighter undercoat. There are even some outliers within the range you wouldn’t immediately think of due to its name, such as Desolate Brown, which is labeled as Olive for its practical naming. You can push the “greenness” of this colour even more depending on how you highlight it, as can be seen in our tutorial for Trench Crusade’s Prussian Stosstruppen, where it is used as the main colour for the fatigues.
Warpaints Historical
I mean, come on, you can’t have a Historical range without A LOT of really nice military greens. At time of writing there are currently 22 paints from the Historical range that can fall within this category, and potentially even more depending on how you classify some of the brown-greens and green-browns! You’ll have noticed several of these were used in the Stosstruppen tutorial above, but we also have plenty of tutorials showing them off on some proper historical minis from WWII here.
John Blanche Masterclass
What if you want something a bit darker? Enter the John Blanche Masterclass range with the suitably dark Midnight Olive, developed as an extension of the Fanatic Olive Green Flexible Triad to push it a bit darker. You can even purchase all seven paints as one of our Flexible Triads Plus+! That’s not the only olive green within the range though, as you can also count Tainted Garden, Rootpath, and Thicket Grove as contenders. A selection of these were used to paint one of the Heavy Mechanized Infantry from Trench Crusade in a step-by-step tutorial which you can see here.
Combat Se7ens: Field Gear Green
The latest entry in the sage of olive greens is our brand-new Combat Se7ens: Field Gear Green paint set. Designed to help you conquer an entire colour scheme with just the seven paints in the box plus Matt Black and Matt White, it’s the perfect place to start your army. Including both Woodland Camo and Camouflage Green, it’s particularly suited to painting up the Emperor’s finest, the Astra Militarum, and will also work great on any number of other military themed painting projects.
As you can see, we leave no olive-green moss-covered rock unturned in our quest to provide you with plenty of options when painting, even just within a single colour family. This didn’t even cover the more vibrant and saturated greens! Be sure to check back in next month as we turn our attention to something a bit more purple.
