The Art of Camouflage

Our Graphic Designer, Eloise, has previously volunteered in Ukraine and tells us all about camouflage and it's history:

"If someone had told me 3 years ago, that I would be making camouflage nets with my own hands in a country I previously visited, now in an active war, I would have laughed. Despite having always had an interest in modern military history, that seemed far-fetched.

Yet there I was last year, in Western Ukraine, precisely doing that, again, but this time my curiosity took me to a different volunteer centre notorious for a type of net harder to make. The centre is run by a team of bossy but lovely ladies, I was quickly put to work, showed and supervised for the rest of the day. What I tried to do was undone and redone multiple times, not easy at all and after 4 hours I got a headache! But I persevered and after 4 days I was starting to get there. An experienced team of 4 can cover a length of net (2x6m) in a few hours.

In this age of high tech, and modern warfare evolving very fast, especially in an active war zone, why would there be a need for doing this by hand you might wonder? Well, because of imperfections, the pattern never repeat itself, making it a lot more difficult for drones to detect. Those nets are used to cover trenches and piece of artillery, and apparently they are very much in demand on the front line.

All this made me wonder, how was camouflage as we know it invented? Did it come as I suspect, with WWI, the first modern war? Let’s find out.

I vividly remember a scene from The Last of the Mohican, where British soldiers get ambushed by Hurons in a forest clearing, with bright red uniforms, they were an easy target. In comparison, native Americans living in harmony with nature were perfectly hidden, the European invaders were used to fight very different wars where close combat meant you needed to distinguish uniforms.

But we have to wait industrialisation and the great innovation of the 20th century for the idea of representing visual deception as simple two-dimensional patterns to come to light.

During the First World War the French army began assembling top-secret squads of artists to disguise its troops. They created drab hooded smocks and painted screens in natural colours, to blend soldiers and equipment into their surroundings. When the UK joined the war, it followed suit. Notably, the UK marine artist and naval conscript Norman Wilkinson pioneered an effort to paint navy ships in bold, abstract patterns called ‘dazzle’. These stripes broke up the ships’ lines, making them difficult to interpret, throwing off U-boat targeting, a bit like a zebras trying to confuse their predators. This is a good example of art at the service of the military.

When it comes to printed camouflage patterns there are 2 main types: organic-looking shapes or ‘digital style’ camouflage patterns, made of squares. The latter is actually not new! Such patterns were first developed during the Second World War, for for the Waffen-SS, combining micro- and macro-patterns in one scheme.

But how do these pattern visually work? Camouflage pattern specialists take shapes that are found in nature and embed them into the camouflage, so your subconscious takes that one and logs it with everything it’s seen prior and says, “OK, these are all the right shapes, ignore them all.” But the brain will come back to that pattern and analyse it again, eventually discovering the anomaly. However the time that it takes to do that can make a difference to an exposed soldier; four to six seconds before recognition is considered excellent performance.

But what about our humble camouflage nets? As they did in the first World War, then in Britain in WWII, and now in Ukraine, volunteers still weave camouflage netting. And this modest piece of low tech is still made pretty much the same way, and able to deceive drones and save lives.

Check the amazing work volunteers do on Instagram @by_porokhova"