Hey Gang,
Old Man Morin here. For years I was know for painting and playing with one army... Germans. In fact my obsession with painting German gaiters was been a running joke on various podcasts and Facebook pages for some time now. A few friends have gone back through old podcasts and have actually requested a tutorial on how I actually painted gaiters way back when (ok... I still paint em like this).
Now I understand that most gaiters will not look like mine. I took a quick look at a few pictures of Germans soldiers and based my method on pictures like this:
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A disclaimer. I tend to paint a little more "cartoony" then some WW2 painters. My gaiters do look slightly weird so zoomed in but they blend into the models nicely on the tabletop.
I usually start the gaiter painting later in the painting process. I don’t wait until the end (after the last highlight) in case my fingers rub a little of the paint off. I start by base coating the area a medium grey colour (Grey/Green by Vallejo for example) before washing that base with a black wash of some sort (I usually use whatever dark GW wash I have kicking around, these days I am using Nuln Oil). I am not terribly neat at this point. The area ends up looking like this:
I then use a fine detail brush (or something equivalent) to paint very thin lines at the top and bottom of the gaiter area. I use GW’s Nurgling Green. It has nice coverage and goes well with the grey/green uniforms of my Germans.
From there, I very carefully paint in one to three parallel lines depending on the gap between the top and bottom lines. Without fail I will make mistakes in this process so I usually have to go back and neatly black line between the top and bottom green lines.
And Voila! Finished gaiters!
Sure they look a bit stripe-y up close up but on the table top they look great (at least I think so).
Thank you for checking in!
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