Hummel paintjob

Basic paintings

Warning for those expecting a short post: this was going to contain a bunch of long stages. After the priming I had to do the camouflage, but then there'd be some weird detailing and tweaking. Among other things the aiming equipment, the gun's lock, all the track parts needed their own special handling, just like the boxes and crates for the crew... Lots to do, in surprisingly many steps.

Priming black

Just to be sure I primed Hummel from all around. In a suboptimal light I managed to miss the space between those two boxes by the back wall. Luckily I was fully prepared for two priming sessions, minimum.

The 150mm howitzer seemed to have been nicely coated in one run, but there was always the chance of something being accidentally overlooked. That's why I took photos to let the camera show me what my eyes missed.

On the first priming session I painted the tracks only from the inner and outer sides, the thin edges were left purposefully for the next evening. I also didn't aim for a perfect flat coat, they'd be mostly covered in black grey anyway in another day or two.

Treating tracks

Like in the StuG project I blasted the black-primed tracks with black grey (VMA 71956) because it felt and looked like a good way to do these.

To reproduce the bits worn clean by the road wheels I repeated my approach of thinning down Gunmetal (VMA 71072) quite a forkin' lot and then used that along the centers of the track links and along the guiding teeth. This could've been done a bit thinner still for a gentler look. Again the effect was stronger on camera than in nature.

Today I used the thin metal paint also on the track armour part to make it look like an actually used length of track that was then hanged in place, it was going to be a fantastic growth plate for fresh rust. Not that it could be seen too well in place, but again the key point was that it was done in a way I felt correct. Later I made the tracks look a bit dirtier by applying a sillily much thinned down VMA Dirt and left the pieces dry.

Several days later I had time to concentrate on the tracks and I checked their lenghts, then attached the ends together, and painted the final pins with black grey. For a more used and freshly driven look I coated them with seriously thinned Chocolate Brown (VMC 70872). Having been closed up the tracks were hung to dry between two pegs. I should've thought of this sort of a trick years ago.

Basecoating in sandy yellow

To get the model's painting going I used again the lighter dark yellow (VMA 71278 Sand Yellow RLM79) as the basecoat. I did try to get some kind of a cloudiness effect instead of aiming for a flat finish. It wasn't preshading by any means, at best its distant relative.

Pulling a camouflage pattern from my woolly hat

It's happened a bunch of times in the 'mumblings' history already and it happened again. I got too excited to paint the greens (VMA 71019 RAL6007 Grün) and browns (VMA 71041 Armour Brown) that I forgot to take WIP photos. My old Badger was using a not-so-small needle & co that it wasn't good for my skills to get a tight pattern painted. A skill issue, in all honesty.

That, combined with the fact that I wasn't good at coming up with patterns on the fly, has been the main reason for my preference of using masks. This time I thought that I could give the freehanded soft-edged approach a go after a long while. Some of the shapes and such worked pretty nicely, some did not.

At this point I was thinking I could take the middle-aged man route and know better: instead of sticking to a three-tone camo I could go for a second attempt at the ambush camo, meaning adding the counter-coloured dots onto the pattern. I wasn't entirely sold on it yet, mostly because of not finding reference photos, but I left the idea to simmer inside my thick skull. There was plenty to do before I could jump into overdoing things.

While I was on the camo airbrushing I also added some shape-breaking forms into the inner sides of the rear doors. The instructions had a mention about it, and it made sense: open doors being drastically different from the rest of the vehicle would stand out like "shoot here" signs.

Camouflaging the gun's front end

For the howitzer I looked at the general painting instruction and thought I'd follow along that one. The plan was to paint the gun's shield, the gun barrel, and the frontmost parts of the cradle. The combat compartment's end where the crew spent their time, was then just left in sandy yellow. Doing this freehand was otherwise ok but the shield left me somewhat ticked off. I could've left them that way, most of the shield was going to be blocked by the front armour plate anyway, but like I said: it annoyed me.

Metalless metals

My hobby schedule was what it was, now I jumped onto smaller details and thought I'd tweak the camouflage later. I painted all the bare metal parts in black grey again, and later drybrushed them with cold grey. The howitzer's aiming setup was a clear one for this, elsewhere I poked at things like the wheels and some moving bits. I wasn't entirely sure of my coverage being big enough yet, so I was ready to come back to extend the bare metallics later on.

With the tow cable nicely in place I had an easier time painting it, as opposed to a piece of thread snaking this way and that way. Of course now I had to be wary of accidentally painting on the hull. Luckily the travel lock was unfoldable out of the way. With two layers the cable looked pretty nice, maybe I had to still return to it with fresh eyes.

Wheelsets

I couldn't avoid them any longer, so I assembled the road wheels and each of them, idler wheels included, got a poly cap inside them. That poly cap kept the wheel nicely on the bogey without the need to glue them in, and they spun freely. So it was in theory, testing in prod would show us soon enough.

They spun well and were easily detached, while also not falling off at a glance. That was a very apprecietable feature.

 

As expected and required, the rubber rims of the road wheels were painted in Tire Black (VMA 71315). This simple detail improved the overall look by a lot again. Now that the road wheels were in this stage I could start playing with the tracks, supported by the detachability of the idler wheels and return rollers, the drive sprockets were more of a "I suppose that is fine" as they didn't get held the same way. The lenghts were perfect, yay for 1:1 instructions!

 

While I was slapping tire black in places I also painted the rubber pads on the bogies. No one would notice, but I found it important to have them done anyway. Spinning the model in my hands I suddendly noticed the two exhaust pipes, and painted them. They, too, got a base of black grey, and later a sloppy drybrushing of cold grey for the heat-stained surface. The holes in the ends I painted black and left the pipes to wait for some rust oils that felt like they weren't that far in the future anymore.

Engineering tools and all wooden things

This time the engineering equipment was limited to two shovels. They had wooden handles, so I combined them here with the others. 

Following the usual recipe I painted the shovel blades in two rounds, black grey and then cold grey. The same way I went through the crew's machine gun, the jack's parts, and the jack block's reinforcements. In the first photo you could see how I overeagerly painted the front clamp metallic as well while they and the wider shovel blade clamps should remain sandy yellow or even attempt to follow the actual camo pattern.

For wood painting I fetched my AK Interactive set for warm woods. I hadn't thought of this before so I spent a bit thinking what I was even going for, and then started with Cork (AK11119). When that was dry on the bits, I mixed some Light Earth (AK11115) into the Cork for gentle drybrushing. Finally I dabbed some choice parts with plain Light Earth.

The jack block required painting of the metallics

I found a surprising amount of wooden things in addition to the shovel handles and the omnipresent jack block. The loader's rammer for smashing the shells and cartridges into the chamber, the machine gun's shoulder thingie, a few handles I decided to paint wooden, and the plank that the crew used to make loading the ammo racks easier. All the others got the same treatment I wrote above, the double-plank also got some Wood Base (AK11351) for extra highlighting. It was the largest and most noticeable wooden detail so I felt it was worth to spend a few extra moments. While I was on it, I also painted a few tiny dots into the crossbeams as nail ends.

Painting natural wood wasn't something I could claim expertise in, they were all a bit hasty and simple. A brown oil wash might help them reach a better level?

Of course this choice I made, painting them mostly in the sprues, required fixing some parts later on. They were small things and I did not document them separately.

Ordnance

Elementary details for a self-propelled howitzer, and even more useful for a diorama, there were numerous shells and empty cartridges. I thought the gunpowder bags were in a separate crate for weather safety.

I used old gold on the cartridges over a couple of layers, and I allowed shadows to remain because I felt they fit even if in real world they were shiny and sparkly. All the shells got a coating of dark green, and I'd drybrush them with a lighter green, an olive green specifically or whatever fitting I found. Otherwise I'd go with my gut feeling. In addition to that the shells needed their fuzes and driving bands painted.

Then the next evening came and I drybrushed the shells with olive green (VMC 70894 Camo Olive Green) and was pleased with that. For the driving bands I actually had an unopened bottle of Copper (VMA 71068) that fit the need perfectly. I didn't play with the fuzes now while the other paints weren't perfectly dry yet, so I left that for the next time.

Aiming stakes

One of the more standing-out details was the set of aiming stakes that were red-white striped, and they could not be forgotten. I had primed them black so next I sat to think how to do this the simplest way. Setting up the airbrushing station for a couple of silly puffs of paint did not spark joy, especially as that'd required maskings and two separate sessions. Manual work was the solution, then, and I painted them off-white (VMA 71119 White Grey) except for the very ends.

I used the instruction sheet's 1:1 image to my benefit and after a bit of paint-drying I painted the red bands (VMA 71003 Red RLM23). To get the edges as clean as possible I painted the edges of the red bands from the opposite end, left ends from the right and vice versa.

Both ends of the sticks were unpainted so I just used some Wood Base (AK11351) on them, and then brybrushed carefully with AK's Light Earth. At this point I realized that the clamps needed to be hull-coloured, so I painted them sandy (RLM79). Maybe they needed some more love shown to them but that, too, could wait for the finishing up stage, or post-installation at least.

Now I was left with the metal spikes that got rammed into the ground or into an enemy soldier's liver, should they venture too close. Like all the other bare metals, they got the dark grey base with a cold grey drybrushing treatment.

They ended up looking surprisingly neat. Using my bare and bad eyes with built-in dynamic error correction they looked so much better than what the digital closeups offer us, but that was life. I installed the stakes into the back end of the vehicle, and I added the touching up of the upper sides of the stakes to my long FIXME list. When painting them I thought I had covered enough on the curves, but here we saw it again: I assumed too much :D

Taking the camouflage somewhat further

When I painted the Hinterhalt-Tarnung for the first time a couple of years ago, I liked it quite a lot, so I did some checking online for references or examples. Nope, I found none, so I couldn't justify my desire with "someone else has already done it". I also didn't care too much about that so I grabbed a small paintbrush, some green (RAL6007) and yellow (RLM79), and started painting dots and slashes around the walls.

I started doing little dots, but ended up doing something that reminded me of the anti-slip pattern on metal flooring (tread plate, diamond plate). The most difficult thing, as always, was to avoid too much regularity. During the first session I got most done on the hull, and a good portion of the gun itself. The result so far looked pretty fun already.

Being excited I ran to continue this work the very next evening. All in all doing this silly stuff took about ninety relaxing minutes.

At this point the paintjob part was pretty much done, and I decided that the next step in its life would mean oil washing the insides of the fighting compartment, and then installing the howitzer in place. Only after that I would feel good about installing the wheelsets and the tracks, and at that point I could pin wash the outer hull. Before that I ought to give the humans a bit of my time as well.