Painting German Gaiters

Old Man Morin here.  My obsession with painting German gaiters has been a running joke on the podcast and on the Facebook page for some time now.  So much so that I have actually had requests to demonstrate how I do it.  Well, as many of you know, we never turn down requests here on the LRDG.  Without further ado… Here we go!

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:

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) and 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 terrible 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 Nurgling Green lines. 

And Voila!  Finished gaiters.  Sure they look stripy up close up but on the table top they look great (at least I think so).  Thanks for checking in.  Til next time!!!