Green as a colour for Roman Reenactment

[Primvs Pavlvs]

Even in an age of mass produced "standard issue" and DPM you can see a degree of variety:

UMMMMMM DPM the sexiest camo ever designed :wink:

[Magnus]

I am hoping my guys will get different shades of green, just by the fact that they'll hopefully be getting it from different sources...some may dye it as well, so the uniformity in colour should be accurate in that sense.

[M. Demetrius]

Greens are available from any green plant. Some other sources besides vegetables were used for dyes, though, such as shellfish, different sorts of earthdyes, and minerals...copper oxides are green, and they certainly will stain skin and cloth, so they could be a readily availble green pigment.

And I agree with the statements about dying linen. Vegetable dyes just don't penetrate the fibers like they do on wool. Tried it. Pale pastels are about as dark as can be done, unless you resort to modern analine or chemical dyes. When you see dark red or bright blue linen for sale, you can just figure it's not "authentic" because the colors couldn't be made using what the Ancients had at their disposal. Mixing linen and wool together, which was done in different ways, will give stronger colors.

We had a lot of fun finding out things like that. Our hands looked like some kind of art project in themselves!