Bolt Action - Painting German Gaiters (The Old Man Morin Way)

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:

 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!