Tuesday, December 23, 2025

cleverly hidden in cotton clouds / a cartoon camouflage

Back in 2019, we blogged about and reproduced the drawing from a wartime cartoon by British artist Bernard Hugh. Originally published in The Bystander, it was reprinted in Cartoons Magazine in 1917. It proposed an ingenious method of camouflaging an airplane while in flight: that it could be camouflaged by sandwiching it between large clumps of cloud-like cotton wool. Looks like a fine idea to me. Recently, I fed Hugh's cartoon drawing to an AI processor, and the image above is what it produced.
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Saturday, December 20, 2025

dragon fly camouflage / from muck to flashing colors

Poster © Roy R. Behrens 2019

American Nature-Study Society, The Nature-Study Review. Lancaster PA, November 1918—

The submarine and camouflage have their counterpart in the insect world. Children exploring ponds and creeks for animals for their aquarium circus often find a mud colored monster with an almost uncanny extension jaw. This common dweller below the water is the larva of the dragon fly. When an adult, it earns the name of "Swiftest of winged creatures." Then it is bedecked with flashing sapphire, emerald or garnet. In its nursery in the mud, however, its dress is camouflaged and is the color of the muck in which it awaits its next meal. Children delight in watching it use its extension jaw, which it shoots out to seize unsuspecting prey.

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khaki-colored dash down the boulevard in Hollywood

Hollywood actor Wallace Reid
Anon, in Picture Magazine (March-July 1918)—

[Hollywood film star] Wallace Reid is busily engaged in studying the art of camouflage so he can paint his new khaki-colored speed demon in such a manner that he can dash down the boulevard without being seen by the ever-watchful eye of the speed cop.

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Wednesday, December 17, 2025

camouflage as a less hazardous wartime assignment

US wartime camouflage in France, 1918
It is no surprise to learn that, in both world wars, draft eligible men in the US were apprehensive about the hazards of serving. A good number of them, maybe most, made an effort to be assigned to service roles that were less hazardous than serving as infantry in the trenches. Others, who had worked in civilian life in specialized vocations, were well-advised to look for ways to serve in the military equivalent of those same vocations.

Understandably, in World War I, when the formation was announced of an American Camouflage Corps, and artists were encouraged to apply, applications flooded in. 

We thought about this recently when we ran across a reference in the preface (by Anne Wintermute Lane) to The Letters of Franklin K. Lane (1864-1921) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1922), who served in the US Government when Woodrow Wilson was in office. In the preface, the author recalls that an initial difficulty in editing Lane's correspondence was that it took weeks to find and set aside "just the requests for patronage, for commissions, passports, appointments as chaplains, promotions, demands from artists who desired to work on camouflage…[and so on]."

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Nov shmoz ka pop / WWI spurious wacko camouflage

an inept attempt at camouflage / WWI
Gene Ahern (originator in 1921 of the Our Boarding House comic strip featuring Major Hoople), "Ain't Nature Wonderful: Camouflage Still Yet" in Fort Wayne Sentinel, August 14, 1918, p. 3—

About this camouflage music, we juggle the camouflage art on themselves so they would be in their seventh heaven, and have their victims turning flip flaps. A book agent could waft into your office camouflaged as a puff of cigar smoke, and could annoy you with special offers, beautiful bindings, subscriptions, etc., and the only way to get rid of him is to purchase a piece of his stock, because you can't get a toe hold on him to throw him out because he's camouflaged invisible.

Insurance posts could wear the same harness, so you're in for it, fellow citizens, and the only exit for you is to take a try at the camouflage trick yourself.

F'rinstance: Have a 6x3 ebony box in your office and when an ill wind shows up, camouflage yourself like you just expired and fall into the silver-handled box and have on your fizz a camouflaged doesn't-he-look-natural expression.

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Sunday, December 14, 2025

the camouflage craze / a book on camou mania now

Camou Mania
CAMOU MANIA A stunningly designed, richly illustrated book on inventive applications of camouflage in fashion and other aspects of popular culture. Includes a section that I myself was asked to write. See online details here.

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popular fallacy about football / aka pigskin camouflage

image source
Lawrence M. Guyer, Football Camouflage, in Boys' Life (November 1929), p. 16—

"Now, gentlemen," he continued, "I have only a few more words in conclusion of this lecture. I wish to speak for a moment regarding the popular fallacy connected with camouflage. There is a widespread belief that camouflage means to conceal, to hide, to absolutely remove an object from the enemy's view. That, of course, is not at all true. Camouflage means rather to disguise the object in such a way that the enemy is misled. Deception is the end thus to be attained."

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turnip poses as onion / Buck Henry's mother's mimicry

film lobby poster (1928)
Motion Picture Magazine, March-July 1918—

[As leading-lady in Jack Spurlock—Prodigal, Hollywood actress Ruth Taylor (1905-1984), star of the original version of Gentleman Prefer Blondes, and mother of comedian Buck Henry] had to eat an onion in one of the scenes, and she begged Director Carl Harbaugh to camouflage a turnip instead. But a "retake" was necessary, and as there had been only one turnip provided, she was obliged to eat an onion. She canceled a dinner engagement for the evening. Now they have a supply of camouflage onions at the Fox studio.
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Saturday, December 13, 2025

Sir Walter Raleigh makes use of smoke as camouflage

W. Allen Howells, Raleigh Blowing Smoke
Philip Leslie Hale, in his column titled As the World Wags in The Boston Herald on January 24, 1918—

In the definition of "camouflage" the standard French dictionaries are of little or no use. Littre gives "camouflet," the noun, meaning “a thick smoke that one blows maliciously into the nose of one with a lighted paper cone." To give a "camouflet" is to affront, mortify a person. "Camouflet" is also a mining term. This French word is an old one. It is defined in Cotgrave’s dictionary (1678) as "a snuft or cold pie, a smoakie paper held under the nose of a slug or sleeper." Now, a cold pie in old colloquial English meant an application of cold water to wake a sleeper. “To give cold pig" was another form, and it is still used. In dialect a "cold pie” is an accident to a train or carriage in a pit, a fall on the ice, a disappointment of any kind.

In more modern French-English dictionaries, a camouflet is a whift of smoke in the face; a stifler; an affront, rap over the knuckles, snub.

•••

Adrian Margaux, If Our Caricaturists Had Flourished Before: Some of the Drawings They May Have Made, in the Strand Magazine, November 1918, pp. 365-366—

W. Allen Howells, British illustrator. when asked to choose a subject for a comic portrait—"…I should like to [illustrate] Sir Walter Raleigh, as I have an idea he was one of the pioneers of camouflage in this country. A French slang dictionary tells me that the word means blowing smoke through a paper cone into another person's face as an insult, and I can imagine Sir Walter making use of the device between his draws of tobacco smoke."

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camouflage, patriotism and propaganda / a big parade

It was Oscar Wilde who said: "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." And surely one might also surmise that some of the world's most godawful music springs from patriotism. 

Shown here is the sheet music cover (as well as the record label) for My Dream of the Big Parade, a rousing composition from World War I. The cover is signed by a WWI-era British artist named Starmer, probably Walter P. Starmer (1877-1961). 

He was not a camouflage artist, but in the top left background of the illustration you can see that he has included a dazzle-painted British ship, not unlike the RMS Olympia. 




Starmer was British, but a note at the bottom left of the sheet music cover says "Made in USA", and the music was created by Jimmy McHugh (1894-1969), a prolific American composer who devised such famous songs as I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby, and On the Sunny Side of the Street.

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Friday, December 12, 2025

countershading and disruption in artillery camouflage

The three photographs in this blog post were originally published in black and white in Scientific American during World War I. 

As posted here, they have been restored and AI colorized. They are excellent examples of attempts to camouflage artillery by applying countershading (as proposed by American artist Abbott H. Thayer) and by breaking up the cannon's shape by applying high contrast disruptive patterns, such as stripes. 





It is interesting to look at these in comparison to a series of five hand-drawn illustrations (as shown below) by WWII British army camoufleur and eminent zoologist, Hugh B. Cott, in Adaptive Coloration in Animals, which we have blogged about before.



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Thursday, December 11, 2025

striped and splashed and dotted with disruptive colors

unidentified WWI dazzle-painted ship (AI color), c1918
John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer. NYC: Harper and Brothers, 1925, pp. 280-281—

The snub nosed transport sludges slowly through the Narrows in the rain. Sergeant-Major O'Keefe and Private First Class Dutch Robertson stand in the lee of the deckhouse looking at the liners at anchor in quarantine and the low wharf cluttered shores.

"Look some of em still got their warpaint—Shippin Board boats.... Not worth the powder to blow em up."

"The hell they aint," said Joey O'Keefe vaguely. "Gosh little old New York's goin to look good to me.…"

"Me too Sarge, rain or shine I dont care."

They are passing close to a mass of steamers anchored in a block, some of them listing to one side or the other, lanky ships with short funnels, stumpy ships with tall funnels red with rust, some of them striped and splashed and dotted with putty color and blue and green of camouflage paint…

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Sunday, December 7, 2025

seasonal animal tracks / fox and vixen flirt and play

Above Book jacket for Judith Krantz, Dazzle. NY: Crown, 1990.

•••

Sy Montgomery, Seasons of the Wild: A Year of Nature's Magic and Mysteries. Buffalo NY: Firefly Books, 1995, p. 74—

In January and February’s snows, fox tracks tell stories more vivid than any other North American mammal’s. To the novice tracker, following a coyote is as daunting as reading a Proustian tome. But this time of year, fox tracks are the Judith Krantz novels of animal tracking: in them you’ll find fast-paced, easy-to-read love stories. In these winter months, fox and vixen flirt and play, cementing and renewing pair-bonds that usually last as long as both survive.

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Thursday, December 4, 2025

a primer of visual literacy—including basic camouflage

book cover
Donis A. Dondis, A Primer of Visual Literary. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1973, p. 56—

Most of our textural experience is optical, not tactile. Not only is texture faked rather convincingly in plastics and printed material and faked fur, but, also, much of what we see that is painted, photographed, and filmed convincingly presents texture that is not there. If we touch a photograph of silky velvet, we do not have the convincing tactile experience the visual clues promise. Meaning is based on what we see. This fakery is an important factor in survival in nature; animals, birds, reptiles, insects, fish, take on the coloration and texture of their surroundings as a protection against predators. Man copies this camouflage method in war in response to the same needs for survival that inspires it in nature.

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Wednesday, December 3, 2025

suspended camouflage nets / gunny sack donations

Above The Maharajah of Patiala examining 9.2-inch howitzer shells under camouflaged netting (1918). Royal collection of the United Kingdom. Public domain.

•••

US NAVY SEEKS OLD GUNNY SACKS in Santa Ana Register (Santa Ana CA), February 4, 1942—

Seattle—If you have any old gunny sacks laying around your house, the 13th Naval District would be glad to get them. Just be sure they're empty, turn them inside out, and ship them to the District Camouflage Officer, Navy Supply Depot, Pier 41, Seattle.

They can be used as "garlands" on camouflage nets, the navy said, for which there is a shortage of such materials.

The navy also asked commercial fishermen to donate discarded purse seine and gillnets for camouflage purposes.

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