Cheers 6milPhil!
I think many artists have come to fame expressing themselves on canvas!
Seriously, painting canvas covers can be one of the more fun parts of doing up your micros. It is a place to put some variety, some individual character, into your units.
Was canvas camo'd? Yes. Sometimes.
Did it match the camo on the vehicles? Occasionally. Not always.
Bear in mind that a truck would age very differently from its own canvas cover. Colored canvas faded at different rates than painted metal, the canvas was often stowed when trucks were re-painted in local depots, and the canvas was less durable than the metal, so that you would expect to see many different canvases over the life of the truck.
The net result is that very few trucks should have matching canvases, and very few trucks should have canvases that match the truck body's paint job.
Here are some examples from my work.
First, some French halftracks:
My thinking here was that French artillery prime movers did not actually spend much time in the field, given how recent the mechanization of the artillery was, how static the Armee Francais was during the "drole de guerre" (or as the Brits said, the "Sitzkrieg"), and how brief the actual battle of France was when it came.
Given this thinking I wanted them to look reasonably factory-fresh. But I still wanted to capture some character and some subtlety in the canvas. Oh, and I think French camo patterns are cool, which adds to the fun.
So I painted the canvases to match the camo pattern I selected for the vehicle bodies. But I tried to ensure poor continuity of patterns from hood to canvas, and I specifically did not camo-pattern the wooden truck-beds. These particular models do not have much texture to the canvas, which made dark-washing largely irrelevant. But I weathered the canvases more heavily than the vehicle bodies, in particular giving a heavy dry-brushing to lighten and dull the camo patterns a bit, so that the overall texture might appear different.
Now some Italian light trucks:
Italian trucks were generally not camo'd. My Italians are painted up for continental service (I'm not big on the Western Desert campaigns -- more interested in Italians for Tunisia, Sicily, and the Eastern Front).
I started with white primer.
I then base-coated with Italian Green, which is sort of a light green-gray. Some of the canvases received the base-coat, some did not (stayed white). Then I painted the canvases with either of two different colors -- US Khaki (close to tan), or Sahara Sand (a light beige-green). I split the colors on the cab covers versus the truck-bed covers, again to give some character.
Here the differences are quite stark. That is in part due to the lighting of the photo, which highlights the color differences. Note the truck on the far right ... you can see the difference between the base-coated truck-bed cover, versus the un-base-coated (bare white-primed) cab cover, after both have received a coat of Sahara Sand.
Here they are all finished up. After washing and dry-brushing, the colors have converged somewhat so that the differences are more subtle. Now, the truck that was on the far right in the last photo is in the lower-left in this one. Again notice the subtle difference between the cab and the truck-bed covers.
Not much added work. Only added one step to the painting of the unit (splitting the canvases between two colors instead of just using one for them all). Every other difference was ommissions rather than additions. But even this very simple difference added some welcome character to the finished trucks.
