Alright, I said this long time ago, and I actually did this project some time ago… I had some friends asking me about it and suggesting I post my results on the forum, so here goes.
A brief recap… the colors WotC chose for both Italy and ANZAC has bothered me for a very long time… Italy the most, as its colors are just far too close to Russia who is both an enemy nation and one they are often in close proximity with (and often directly fight against)… Italian brown just doesn’t look like an ally of Germany, they look more like a satellite of Russia… it’s just wrong on so many levels to me… and being OCD as I am, it is probably “just me” that it bothers, but for a long time I schemed and plotted to get rid of the Italian brown and replace it with a color that would look nothing like Russia, be unique in its own color scheme, but still “mesh nicely” with their German allies. In the end, I chose a “Metallic Silver”… though really any grey would have sufficed, but I had a lot of metallic silver paint floating around from other projects and I knew the color I had worked well with plastic miniatures so I went with it.
As for the ANZAC player, they weren’t quite as bad color-wise, but once again… grey just didn’t work for me (especially if I was changing Italy to silver/grey)… I always thought the ANZAC player should look something similar but different to the UK player. I really wanted something in the “khaki” range… a little darker than UK biege, but not dark enough to start looking like those brown Italians… obviously, if I was changing Italy to Silver, that opened up the “brown” hues a lot more… but I really wanted ANZAC just a few tones darker than the UK forces… in the end, I chose “Satin Nutmeg”… couldn’t really find a Khaki that I liked.
Below are my results for the entire project and how I made it happen…