A bright red primer
While I still had some red primer (VSP70624 Pure Red), I used it with the assumption of that keeping the upcoming yellowish basecoat from becoming too cold. Black primer might have a cooler effect on the yellow, also it might require more layers to cover up. Of course I could be absolutely wrong in my assumptions here.
Most importantly I wanted to see how my texture fooling would behave with a paintjob. At a first glace it looked pretty fun!
My tracks also got their first paint layers, but in black (Vallejo 74602 Black). I somehow managed, as you could see in the photo, to blow or knock a short subsection off.
A bit later I was trying to reattach the broken off pieces, but the connectors were broken in a way that they didn't grab on anymore. So I built a replacement chunk and attached it to the existing long bit, and the broken off part I thought to use as a short track armour somewhere.
Sandy yellow for the Deutsche Afrikakorps
Deutsches Afrikakorps was in my mental model always Dunkelgelb, while in some photos their tanks also had some green camo over dark yellow base. For a very short moment I pondered if I should go for a camo scheme, but decided to stick to my primary idea.
Round 1
I airbrushed the hull, turret and the wheelsets with Sand Yellow (VMA 71028) instead of Dunkelgelb. I didn't paint the road wheels from the flip side and left them red to depict the rust-protective paint on the invisible side, just like the bottom of the tank. Both the drive sprockets and idler wheels I did paint from two sides as they were very visible.
This was a funny thing to realize: had I caused this orange skin effect by airbrushing, I'd been very annoyed, but now as it was purposeful I was quite content.
Here in the lower front edge the effect was more to the Soviet casting quality than the neater stuff. But it was all my doing so I couldn't blame anyone else. The photos revealed, again, more unpainted parts with high efficiency, unlike my bare eyes. I honestly hadn't noticed the left edge's redness at all.
Round 2
To cover up my failings I did a second pass with the sand yellow, in thin layers from different angles to try to make sure there were no more missing parts. The tracks also got a new (or in the case of the fix-up bit, their first) layer of black primer.
Faking the insides
Just in case someone found a gap where the insides of the tank could be seen I decided to paint a basic main colouring just to call that done. The hull's floor and the lower sides were painted red, the upper half or so was painted white (VMA 71119 White Grey).
The insides of the turret I painted completely with the off-white. If I got bitten by the painting bug, I might consider painting the gun's lock and some random details but I most definitely wasn't planning on spending much time. As I said, you were not supposed to see inside. At worst I'd take a photo like the one below for documentation completionism.
Starting with dark grey
While I still had some time, I loaded some dark grey (VMA 71055 Black Grey RLM66) in my airbrush and worked on the tracks. I wasn't going to weather the tracks heavily, just some gentle sandlike effects in addition to the graphite pen.
While blasting dark grey around I used it on the muzzle brake and on the coaxial machine gun's armoured sleeve. Now they didn't look like the tank had just rolled off the Vomag assembly line.
This was the general, overall paintjob, next I'd get to work on the details. This time I wouldn't forget the insignia before starting the weathering operations.
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