Thank you both! I'm reading the history you supplied Fubar and it looks like they did paint with anything they had, including mops and brushes, and even used whatever paint they could get their hands on. I reckon you could paint it house-paint brown and be fine. How gloriously un-uniform and delicious! The rules are: THERE ARE NO RULES!
This article is re-enforcing what I suspected. Camo was at the C.O.'s discretion. Any orders for uniformity were generally not followed because there was no supply chain to support it. They used whatever they could find, and many in remote locations had to take things from the surrounding villages, or try and make their own paint out of the natural offerings. This is really cool! Even a paint spray gun would have been a wild luxury for some of the supply starved frontline units. LOL! If you had a battle fatigued C.O. drunk enough to order them painted all RED, then that's what they became!
I had always been curious as to why the Japanese Army reportedly didn't paint the bottom of the planes white or creme. It's clear now. They didn't have any to paint on there! Anything close to green or brown was about it. And why all the spotted schemes? Because they didn't even have enough locally sourced green or brown to go around, so they just put some on there hoping it at least broke up sun glare! No wonder the paint came off so fast! I really was probably house paint from a local farmer half the time! Applied with brushes, mops, rags, even bare hands!