Lead Adventure Forum
Miniatures Adventure => Old West => Topic started by: goon3423 on June 28, 2017, 05:47:28 AM
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As long as I've been painting old west stuff I still debate what color to make buttons now & then. I know you had the fancy uniform brass buttons and the like but what was say the buttons on an average shirt made from? Metal? Wood?
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Bone or wood for the most part I reckon.
cheers
James
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In the UK brass, mother of pearl and glass were popular (but expensive). Pasteboard covered in cloth were common for the less well-off, Charles Dickens wrote an article about a new automated machine for making these in the 1850s. Earlier many people had cast their own in a button-moulder using lead or pewter, so poorer or country families may have still been doing that.
I assume it was the same in America.
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Much as sunjester said.
There is a local ghost town that went bust in the late 1860s. Several stores were abandoned with everything still on the shelves and the state now operates it as a living museum. From what I have noticed in browsing over the clothing selection, the cloth buttons were for women's wear or men's suits. Men's work clothing tended towards bone or other hard buttons, the metals ones were mostly lacquered.
In the end, paint most buttons on men's wear black or dark brown and you should be fairly accurate.
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Undergarments or outer garments? Dress or work shirts? Metal four-hole buttons with paperboard backing were common for both. Undergarment buttons could be bone, wood, glass, tin, celluloid, nacre, or hard rubber. Outer garment buttons were typically the same materials as well. The ones supposed to be visible would be larger and more decorative, while the ones not supposed to be visible would be simple and utilitarian. Buttons for dresses and formal coats would usually be colorful and decorative. A cowboy's shirt button would usually be something cheap like small tin or bone, and would be bare metal or unpainted bone. A cowboy's jacket would have large bone, metal, wood, or hard rubber, and if not specially decorative would be brown or black, or bare metal.