Products mentioned in this Article
MERDC Painting Templates With Chris Townley
This Article was written some time ago and while the MERDC scheme hasn't changed the amount of vehicles sure has so we've updated this article with downloadable templates for WWIII: Americans!
Last week Aaron took a look at the MERDC (Mobility Equipment Research and Development Center) scheme. This is the camouflage pattern that we chose to paint all of our Team Yankee US vehicles.
The thing I found particularly interesting about this scheme is that the template is the same regardless of the theatre of its use, only the colours change. The benefit of this is that it makes it relatively easy to paint your vehicles in a historical scheme.
Of course, the downside is that all of your vehicles (of a type) need to look roughly the same. Realising this, I decided to take what many might consider the path of most resistance, coming up with some painting masks that would let me cut out either the Forest Green or Field Drab sections (I’m painting a force in the Winter Verdant MERDC variant, like the Battlefront studio US models pictured in the Team Yankee book) and airbrush that colour over a base of the other one.
Before I could start making masks that I could use for airbrushing I needed to find out what colours are meant to go where. Aaron was kind enough to lend me his book on MERDC and some internet searches gave me a wide variety of material – thank goodness for the internet and large scale modellers!
Here you can find PDF versions of our painting templates. Sean has turned the drawings into versions that are correctly scaled for our models so you can print them and have them sitting next to your model while you paint.
Make sure you tell your PDF viewer to print them at actual size and not shrink to fit