One of my sons has been wanting to make a ghillie for a while now.
He had one of those (very cheap) chinese "leaf" ponchos that looked good, as long as you closed your eyes. On one side, it had a pretty good realtree pattern, but the backside of the material was white. And since they were all sewn from the same position, that makes it that once you donned the suit, either the front or the back would show only the white side which as you would imagine, just sucked.
If they had taken the time to put the camo pattern on both sides of the leaf texture, would have been pretty good. But, alas, they didn't. So, that was where he started with the donor material.
In order to take care of that, we used about 9 different colors of browns and greens and spray painted it inside and out. This worked well by itself and all alone, but needed more 3D textures because you could still see the human outline.
So, we got some burlap, some string, and even some artificial flowers that are native to the area (ferns, etc). Tied them all over the suit in random locations and patterns and stuff. And we left a lot of extra strings so we could tie on some sticks and things that you'd pick up off of the ground and give it even more depth and natural shadows.
After the second trip to the mountain seeing how everything looked, we used a baseball cap and saw that the bill cast too much shadow in the face which stood out too bad. So, we cut the bill off of it and did the same thing to it adding burlap and artificial plants and leaves to break up the outline of the cap/hood.
Now we have something that just melts into the area where we live and hunt and after some trial and error and some work on his part, he has something better than any store bought camo could ever be.
Here's a closeup picture of him in the suit from about 12 feet away. At 25 feet, he's literally indistinguishable.
And a picture of the poncho and the hood standing right up over top of it before we put it in the backpack to come home.
He had one of those (very cheap) chinese "leaf" ponchos that looked good, as long as you closed your eyes. On one side, it had a pretty good realtree pattern, but the backside of the material was white. And since they were all sewn from the same position, that makes it that once you donned the suit, either the front or the back would show only the white side which as you would imagine, just sucked.
If they had taken the time to put the camo pattern on both sides of the leaf texture, would have been pretty good. But, alas, they didn't. So, that was where he started with the donor material.
In order to take care of that, we used about 9 different colors of browns and greens and spray painted it inside and out. This worked well by itself and all alone, but needed more 3D textures because you could still see the human outline.
So, we got some burlap, some string, and even some artificial flowers that are native to the area (ferns, etc). Tied them all over the suit in random locations and patterns and stuff. And we left a lot of extra strings so we could tie on some sticks and things that you'd pick up off of the ground and give it even more depth and natural shadows.
After the second trip to the mountain seeing how everything looked, we used a baseball cap and saw that the bill cast too much shadow in the face which stood out too bad. So, we cut the bill off of it and did the same thing to it adding burlap and artificial plants and leaves to break up the outline of the cap/hood.
Now we have something that just melts into the area where we live and hunt and after some trial and error and some work on his part, he has something better than any store bought camo could ever be.
Here's a closeup picture of him in the suit from about 12 feet away. At 25 feet, he's literally indistinguishable.
And a picture of the poncho and the hood standing right up over top of it before we put it in the backpack to come home.
