What I'll be doing on mine is black background and doing the logo and such in red. You have to be careful of bleeding when doing dual/multipe colors You can also use acrylic paints for coloring.
Concerning colors:
Black - We always use USMC Black (stands for US Marine Core I think)
When shopping at Tandy Leather/ Leather Factory you can get 2 types of colors (in general) Fiebings and Pro Dye. They are both made by Fiebings but the Pro Dye comes out brighter and looks better, and fiebings will come out bright and good IF you use an airbrush.
As for what you're doing, I agree with you on solid black, you can't go wrong with that esp. on a black truck, but if you wanted it to be a little more obvious you could start adding colors or go ahead with the antique look. But when I picture it being stained like that, it would look good but it wouldn't really match unless you added more matching tooled panels and leather stuff, in which case it'd look great IMO. One tip you'll probably like, just try the antique or multi colors, if you dont like it or mess it up, you can go over it with the USMC black.
As for surface, you'll want to treat it and I suggest Super Shene, thats what is used on that armor. Actually for reference, on that armor is USMC Black, Pro Dye Red, and gold guilding.
