Tuesday, July 21, 2026

was utter nonsense / camouflage as painting things up

Bus for wounded soldiers at WWI fundraising rally [colorized]
Peter Rodyenko, “Camouflage: Modern aerial photography outmodes paint, results in introduction of new techniques” in Life magazine (January 13, 1941), p. 39—

To most people, the art of camouflage means "painting things up." They are, of course, very wrong. In general, they get this impression from seeing pictures of guns and tanks "camouflaged" with crisscross and zigzag designs. In their newspapers they read of snipers who wear strange-colored costumes to "confuse" the enemy. They hear and believe stories about industrial buildings which have been so decorated with dazzle paint that they are invisible from the air. What they do not realize is that most of such stuff is utter nonsense.

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Monday, July 20, 2026

painting camouflage on trucks—then washing it off

WWI camouflaged ammunition truck (colorized)
Eugene Wokal, quoted in Ronald Naversen, The Scenographer as Camoufleur. Dissertation. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University, 1989, p. 47—

I became friends with Major Peter Rodyenko [who taught camouflage at Pratt Institute]…I traveled down there [to Fort Belvoir] to look around and decided I wanted to work on camouflage. We trained by painting trucks and washed off the paint at night so we could do it again tomorrow.

See also
Rodyenko, Peter (1936) “On Camouflage Training” in The Reserve Officer Vol 13 No 9 (September), pp. 5-7.
___(1941) “Camouflage: Modern aerial photography outmodes paint, results in introduction of new techniques” in Life magazine (January 13), pp. 39-42.

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