Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said that “Research is the highest form of adoration.” As we are marveled by the beauty of Creation, we are also contemplating the output of R&D done so far in 2026. For the time being it is still in the skunk zone, but it will see daylight soon and, once again, new standards will be set.
Animal camouflage is an old story while human made patterns have only a century old track record. A perfectly camouflaged lizard hidden under my bench, a stunning pattern on a frog near a medieval castle, diving with a rombous or watching algae grow on the sloth's fur made up for our informal visual education. First you learn to look. Then looking is learning.
Impressionists mobilized during the Great War made the first systematic effort to fool enemy eyes. Their work is relevant today. There is a 1923 painting by Stanisław Czajkowski that I love in the Krasinski palace. If you are smart you can reserve the table next to it and enjoy visual and culinary pleasures at the same time. It looks like Eichenlaubtarn even though it wasn’t camouflage intended, and it preceded the famous German pattern by two decades.
During the famous US Army camouflage trials following the UCP (Universal Camouflage Pattern) disgrace there has been talk about “camouflage families”. “Brush stroke”, “pixelated”, “leaf”, etc. In the Oakmaster nomenclature we like to talk of pattern families in terms of animal concealment such as Tiger / Leopard / Sloth / Frog / Cow. Digital patterns are the only ones that cannot be found in nature but are not invented ex-nihilo as they are a computer version of the frog-lizard family.
The fact is that for the moment there has not been a single 2d pattern that would sum up the last century of concealment design. From the 1942 Frogskin to the ubiquitous Multicam they all have weak points and flashes of genius at the same time. Maybe it would be nice to see a state-of-the-art synthesis in the near future ?