Painting over the pre-painted Panther

Just paint over it

Before I had glued in the road wheels etc, I gave the model for the Project Assistant II to paint. No one should have been confused that this was going to becom a pink panther.

Pink Panther, the

We got permission to use some pink (VGC 72013 Squid Pink) from Project Assistant I's collection. This paint had been sitting untouched for about six years, and it was still useable with a tiny bit of tap water on the bristles.

After the first painting session I installed the wheels and the stupidly-misshapen vinyl tracks. This was a fun sight indeed.

When I asked if it was ready when the wheels were painted, I only got more questions as answers. "Dad, could I also make straight lines with tape like you do?" Of course. "Can I paint blue hearts, dad?" But of course, it's your tank.

At some point I was asked if the road wheels could be painted in rainbow colours. That was something I hadn't expected and thought it might work nicely with a pink hull. She also wanted to paint the tracks somehow, but didn't know how. The near future was going to be interesting.

More paint

A couple of weeks later the painting process continued. We chose a few bottles of paint, because I had no orange nor violet in my collection (or plain dark blue, for that matter). Again more questions like "why do you have such boring colours only?" 

Yeah, we were missing a couple of shades, but that didn't matter as we could mix more. The starting point was red (VMA 71003 RLM23), yellowish (VMA 71033 Yellow Ochre), green (VMC 70942 Light Green), blue (VMA 71111 RAL5007) and a lighter blue (VMA 71318 AMT-7), and I believed we could get a decent rainbow out of those.

The orange-ish was made with a mix of yellow ochre and red, we made a couple of versions between green and blue by adding more and more AMT-7 to the green, and the violet was made with a mix of RAL-5007+RLM23. These photos were taken straight away, I expected the model to look a bit better after the paint had kicked.

On the right side we started from the front even though the rainbow would've been more accurate had I realized to tell her to start from the idler wheel. It turned out cool anyway. If I had another extra Panther, I might be persuadable to make my own version of this, meaning otherwise the same but with a bit more care and maybe with a multi-pink pattern just for the fun of it.

Bling

Then what? The youth heard of my metallic paints, so they were now a must. The pinkness suffered but the artist's eye was uncontrollable.

After the rainbow day the barrel was more grey than anything else, and the turret's top ended up being brightly brassy (VMA Brassy Brass).

Suddendly the tank's left hull and the front glacis plate turned into steel (VMA Steel) with some random sky-blue effects (VMA Arctic Blue). Somehow the right side didn't lose the pink. I really didn't understand the plan here, but I thought it wasn't really required, either.