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Austrian Facings and
Uniform Colors 1792-1815

Originally Published on the Spanner and the Yank Web Site. Used by permission.

Austrian Facings and Uniform Colors 1792-1815

5 April, 2001

A truly needlesome aspect in trying to build a miniature Habsburg army is the limited material on uniforms and facing colors. And of the material that exists, a good percentage is inaccurate.

Graham Travers and I took an initial stab at sorting through the small maze of contradictory, secondary sources. Recently it's been my pleasure to work with Dave Hollins and draw on his extensive knowledge of primary sources and contemporary artwork. He, in turn, has been aided by a group of generous Austrian colleagues. It is due to the collaborative nature of this exercise that a number of answers to the uniform puzzle were found. I'm indebted to Dave for his help.

One need only remember there is no extant Austrian uniform to appreciate the difficulty of the task.

The following color swatches are arranged in "families". The shades are based on a model that calls for midday sun, with the weather being moderately sunny (i.e., just a few clouds in the sky). The colors have been generated using Microsoft's custom color options that allow for the standardized settings of hue, saturation and luminance, in addition to the levels of green, red, and blue.

Note that unless color is actually applied to the fabric (in this case wool), it isn't possible to generate a "true" swatch. However, these colors are based on what they would have looked like on wool, with its low reflectance level.

Dal and I hope this will be helpful to hobbyists, gamers and academics alike. The material is under copyright and is to provide hobbyists with an Internet guide. It may not be reproduced without written permission.

Good Gaming!

Mike MacGillivray

The completed pages are in blue and may be clicked on to get to the relevant page.

Dal's Note: The only problems people may encounter is "color" drift caused by different monitor types, monitor settings and software limitations. Unfortunately there's not much we can do about this.

This page last updated May 25, 2005

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