Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Dazzle-Painted Ship Models in Australia

Dazzle-painted ship models AU National Maritime Museum
There is a selection of wonderful blog posts from 2014 that we've only recently happened upon. They were posted on the blog of the Australian National Maritime Museum, which is in Sydney Harbor, and in fact we've actually visited there

One of the posts, titled When in doubt, Razzle Dazzle them, includes a wonderful WWI photograph of the HMT Zealandia, adorned in striped dazzle paint

Two other posts, called Dazzle ship models and A dazzling connection with WWI, feature the work of museum model maker Col Gibson, who rebuilt models of some of the ships, and whose father actually served on a dazzle-painted transport ship during that war. See above models in process. 

As discussed in four blog posts, including a longer, more recent one on WWI dazzle, art and fashion, dazzle-painting was widely adopted, not only for ship camouflage, but throughout popular culture as well. All this is also featured in an ongoing exhibition, titled War at Sea: The Navy in WWI, which is touring through Australia until March 2018. Wish we had seen it while visiting there.

Blog post detail from AU National Maritime Museum

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Apache Camouflage

Design © Roy R. Behrens, from Edward Curtis photograph
From John G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook. Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1971 (originally published in 1891), p. 37—

They [Apache warriors] knew how to disguise themselves so thoroughly that one might almost step upon a warrior thus occupied before he could detect his presence. Stripped naked, with head and shoulders wrapped up in a bundle of yucca shoots or sacaton grass [sporobolus or dropseed grass], and with body rubbed over with clay or sand along which it wriggled as sinuously and as venomously as the rattler itself, the Apache could and did approach to within earshot of the whites, and even entered the enclosures of the military camps, as at [Forts] Grant and Crittenden, where we on several occasions discovered his footprints alongside the ollas, or water jars.