Most gamers use felt for their 'ground cloth'. You have several options, in UK terrainmat.com the or in North America http://www.hotzmats.com/ and cheapest being going to your local fabric store. For the Europe several different shades of green might work. But for the desert there is usually only one acceptable color of tan. I bought a 5x6' piece and verified the color by looking a Google Earth--pretty close. Of course, if it was wrong it would be too late to return a custom cut piece.
Then I went to the paint store and picked a color chip that was nearly the same color. Their little scanner cannot just scan a piece of felt. I had them make part of the quart of semi-gloss enamel into several cans of spray paint. They cannot make spray cans out latex or flat enamel. Spraying the steel stands allows the paint to be more even and thin. First I prime the company stands white. One could spray the opposite side green for Europe.
Okay, now that the company stands match the felt's color, the remaining chore is to match the platoon stands' color. I chose to make these stands out of the imprintable full-sheet magnetic material. After scanning a piece of felt, I found that it printed out a drastically different color. So, I tried changing the hue in photoshop in various ways. After printing these samples, I finally found two hues that bracketed the desired color and arrived at a tolerable version.
Then choosing two fonts/colors for both sides, grey Helvetica Condensed for Italian and brown Trebuchet for British, I printed the names of the platoons very small (4 point) on centimeter square text boxes. Why identify the vehicles (M13 or A9) and personnel (Inf) this way? Because the 3mm troops are so small that you can't always tell what they are! Admittedly this is a drawback of such a tiny scale. The print is small and of a medium contrast so that it is only legible when you get quite close.
After painting all the stands, I also used the spray paint to paint the terrain frame (described in a future post), play aids and containers.
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