Acrylic painting
I decided to compress a week's worth of painting rambling into one post, from priming to camouflage and basic painting of tools and such. Maybe this'd work as a single entity, as long as I didn't start overdoing the untracked wordcount.
Black primer
The primer went on in two sessions, especially as my first pass had left some uncovered gaps. This photo here, after the first pass, showed the unpainted valleys by the driver's vision port. Unacceptable! Two fine passes were more than good.
Anticorrosion paint test
For the factory-applied red paint I bought a new bottle, they didn't happen to have red brown nor hull brown on the shelf, so I just decided to go with RLM26 (VMA 71105 Brown RLM26) and if needed, mix in a drop of red if it was too brown. Based on a test blast the RLM paint seemed just what I needed, so I didn't start mixing.
As usual, I didn't stress too much about a perfect coverage with this paint, as the primer was going to provide shadows where this didn't reach. Also a bit of a cloudy coverage pattern was only giving more surface texture to the armour plates, unlike a 100% flat coat.
This belly up -photo showed that I had also painted the track well that would never show anywhere, also in this red-brown. After that I didn't do anything specific on them, because they definitely didn't need a camo.
Guess, what I remembered right after taking these photos? I had been so excited about trying out the rolled steel texture, and then promptly forgotten the whole procedure and jumped straight to painting. Not that it was a huge mistake, I was just a bit grumbly because I was looking forward to testing the fun method for a second time.
Sand yellow
My first idea was to use straight Dunkelgelb, as I had bought it some time ago, but the other cat was again sleeping on the deep storage. I went for plan B, sand yellow (VMA71278 Sand Yellow RLM79). It was a very nice paint, no complaints.
Maybe at some point someone was going to ask me what in the Empire am I doing, painting Heer stuff with Luftwaffe paints. Or maybe not.
My wheels needed another round with sandy still, but mostly they were about to be used. Of course I had to build the Panzerwerk Design tracks that I had ordered (I actually ordered two sets, both type 6B w/ cleats) because the last time the tracks were simply great.
A shrapnel pattern
Something brought the idea of making a tight shrapnel pattern instead of freehanding. To implement that I sliced about 2mm-3mm wide bands of masking tape, and cut those between 2cm and 4cm long strips. Those then flew along the hull where they felt like going, just like Bob Ross had instructed.
If I knew how to count, I'd make it directly a three-tone camo, but I started blasting to have sandy borders for the green (VMA 71022 Light Green RLM82) and brown (the sameBrown RLM26 that ought to have been darkened down a notch) polygons. As they were, it wasn't doable to get alternating colours always side by side. Because of that and the colours themselves it looked for a moment like a bag of Finnish candy.
The next evening I masked off a few silly polygons and repainted them with sandy yellow. It immediately toned the candy bag effect down a bit, but the reddish brown was still a bit too bright for my eyes, and not only in the photos but in real world as well.
Fixing the brown
Thinning down one of the Panzer Aces set's browns (VMC 70826 German Camo Medium Brown) and used that to take the red browns down to earth. Washing and filtering this would also become calmer, but I wanted to get to that from a slightly nicer place.
Engineering tools and other metallic bits
During that same session I got to start with the tools and such, like the C hooks, axe, starting crank, shovel and the crowbar. Somehow the fine-tuning sledgehammer escaped my eyes completely in the rush, but to compensate they caught the periscopes instead. Painting them with jeweled lenses interested me in some twisted way.
The photos here showed that I started on the wooden bits for the tools and the jack block. As the base I used a light brown (VMC 70875 Beige Brown) that got some thin lines of lighter brown (VMC 70825 German Camo Pale Brown) along the imagined patterns. They still needed something, as always. I also had to touch up the bare metals later, for the photos revealed ruthlessly how some parts were completely untouched.
Bits painting, cont.
On the second detail painting round I fixed the previously missed metal pieces with black grey. When they, too, had flashed, I drybrushed all unpainted metal surfaces with cold grey (VGA 72750 Cold Grey). I still needed to do the glass lenses of the periscopes black to do anything reasonable for / to them. Photo #4 below showed that I had snapped the crowbar in two and failed to fix it well.
That protector of the gun barrel cleaning rod I painted in uniform green (VMC 70922 Uniform Green), imagining it was made of spare fabric or something, but I only did that after taking the photo. My wood approach still didn't convince me, but to be honest, it never really did.
As my habit seemed to be, I also forgot to take a photo that showed the rubbery radio antenna bases. I also hadn't taken photos of the rubber pads by the axles, either. While playing with the tire black I went around all of the double road wheels. You'd see them when I got to show those bits again.
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