aged/old timber

[carlos marighela]

Try the khaki method Steve

The thing with human perception of colour, is that it is unfortunately shaped for life by what we learn as children, mainly from kiddies' books.
So we all grow up knowing that sheep are white - except of course they're not. Look at any sheep in any field - they are somewhere on a cream - brown spectrum. Similarly, the sea is not blue - more often it is somewhere between green and brown. Grass in rarely green, but has a vast rage of shades, and even the freshest grass tends towards yellow on the spectrum.
And tree trunks are not brown. Look at most tree trunks, they have a lot of green in them - unsurprisingly really, because they're just big plants.
So old timber, even when it's bleached to almost white by age and the elements, still often has a slightly greenish tinge to it - but very rarely brown. Hence the khaki.

The khaki base coat certainly is effective  and those ships and trenches really are the dogs bollox but I'm not at all sold on the theory of colour perception being down to a diet of Bah-bah Black Sheep and Ladybird books.

I just stepped out on to the balcony. The tree trunks outside were definitely brown, well those that weren't grey or off-white that is. The little bits of green I could perceive were those in the shade of the building where moisture is at play. The gums in the direct sunlight were decidedly brown, save for darker and lighter patches on the bark. Not surprisingly, the further away they are and incidentally the closer to scale model trees, the more uniform that brown became.

Before I came in I sat in my car talking on the phone and staring absently at a dilapidated bit of weatherboard fencing. Grey, grey and er grey. A bit that had recently broken off was a biscuity brown at the edges.

Merino sheep tend to somewhere between a light buff and dirty off white when seen up close. At 100-200 metres, probably the scale distance of a 28mm sheep held at arms length, they appear white.

Grass does come in many shades and tones but I've seen plenty of examples of eerily emerald in the tropics to tell me that it really can be bright green, whatever influence People at Work: The Farmer may have had upon my juvenile and plastic brain.