Launcher terrain base

A diorama idea

Now I had the launcher and five guys around it, what was I going to actually do with them? Just having them scattered around didn't sound like any sort of a solution. That made me think if I ought to make some kind of an imitation of map topography with pieces of styrene sheet, but that sounded pretty risky considering the expected squareness/rectangleness of the base itself.

I thought I had seen a piece of Finnfoam (XPS foam) left from my 2011's Imperial Incom T-65 prototype and its asteroid base. The leftover piece, if I still had it, would be stupidly shaped but might provide a solution.

The baseplate

Surprise of all surprises, I had it stored, and it was larger than what I needed. For an initial idea I dropped the dudes into firing position and marked the overall area with a pencil and a ruler.

Of course I didn't own anything that was perfect or even good for cutting this (or any other) thickness of XPS foam, and I surely wasn't going to start sawing it apart. I cut the thing with my well-used xacto knife instead. The result wasn't beautiful.

Ground shaping

The first step into locking my scene started with a 90° counterclockwise rotation of the launcher rack, in comparison to how it was in the previous photo. I drew a deep line along the front plank, and opened the foamboard a bit by twiggling the end of the ruler in it. Then I set the front edge in place, and marked the rear leg's place the same way and repeated the ruler-widening. The launcher sat nicely in place, so one potential crisis was nicely averted.

 

My groundforming started with shallow slices cut off from behind the launcher. Being limited with imagination I ended up making pretty much an arc, which I then tried to deform by chopping a radial groove into one part.

I also, obviously, tested out my space by plopping the guys in place with rockets and all. To counter the shallow decline on one side I drew a shape for a tiny bump on the opposite corner, which ended up looking like a nicely aligned arc. Exactly against what I should've done. At this point I was thinking if I wanted to turn this into a road of some sort, or even a cobblestone plaza. Especially that kind of a semiurban space didn't match my idea of where these were used in 1941, so they were going to be in the countryside with their howling cow.

A bit pointlessly I marked the things, and without any thinking in the same way we planned our Doom wads back in the day. These didn't stay visible for long, I just tried it out while I was poking around anyway.

To get my bump started I covered the corner with white glue and laid my random pieces to somehow fill the area.

For a moment I had a small rock in there, the same I used to press some random shapes all around the sheet. In case the Project Assistants weren't in the habit of saving cool-looking rocks for an army, I'd used a balled-up piece of kitchen foil instead for the shaping.

Preparing the surface

While my glue was curing I used the rest of my Mr White putty, and spread it along the outer edges and then also the upper surface. I let the white glue -covered surfaces to wait for the next day and an application of the new Tamiya Putty (Basic Type) I got some months ago.

At this point my plan was to cover this all with putty so I wouldn't maybe need to panic using oil paints to tweak the ground style. Abteilung's mud and industrial earth sounded like great names for this theme.

Puttying the final corner was its own operation, I applied excess lumps to places that looked like they would benefit from extra coverage or less sharp angles. Of course I could still later on cover the surface with thinned down white glue and sprinkle ballast on it to break the remaining flatness.

This intermediate result of two different putties looked a bit funny, but I decided not to get stuck on that but would prime it all and then see how to proceed. Somehow it felt like staring at it wasn't going to help at all, but to make it even weirder.

Of course I had to dry-fit my bits again, with the assumption of getting some inspiration or a mental guideline. It looked much better now than a few days earlier.

With all the equipment I started thinking that the adjuster guy, who would be standing on the bump, could be standing on some disgusting and sloppy mud. The others could have a bit more dry, sandier ground. Perhaps I could even give a shot to the Vallejo snow effect as long as it wasn't dried up in its bottle/jar.

Side plates and more surface texturing

I managed to get annoyed with the sides of my Finnfoam pieces and that led to a decision of wasting some time in making side plates. To get them done I cut proper chunks off my thinnest styrene sheets, only one of them ended a bit short. These I glued onto the sides with white glue.

Straight plastic and not-straight edge required some gap-filling. Being lazy I taped the open edges with Tamiya's masking tape and used a number of days to slowly fill this up with white glue. After a couple of runs I trusted the solidity and cut the upper edges of the styrene sheets to follow the contours of the terrain. Based on these lines I resumed my silly filling operation.

Finally I used glue around the terrain and sprinkled ballast for texture. I didn't cover all of the ground as I was going to use some weathering mud to get variety onto the earth. Later we'd see if this made any sense in reality.

When I was happy, or at least content enough, I tore my tape off and glued pieces of L profile onto the corners to hide some of my crims. Luckily I had two sizes of that profile, as the smaller one I had thought of using was a bit too short.

 

This was an unplanned improvement. Now I could paint again.

Repainting

For the best coverage I airbrushed the bare side plates and all the ballast-covered parts with Vallejo's black primer. To get a bit of a lighter tone for the ground I mixed some sand yellow (VMA 71028) into the black and dusted it around.

For some reason I didn't want to leave the sides flat black. Maybe I thought it was too harsh, even though it was a perfectly reasonable way to separate the frame from the content. Still, I painted the edges and corner reinforcements with black grey (VMA 71056).

I drybrushed all the ballast-covered surfaces and the harder edges of my terrain, using a shade brighter colour from the one I airbrushed some moments ago. The difference wasn't huge, but I wasn't looking for a dramatic look. This quick dry-fit made it look like the guys were on a lava field. I expected the upcoming mud and snow to help a bit.

Launcher details

Painting at last

Now we got to a more fun part in this operation. The assembly had been, thanks to the photoetch stuff, a bit frustrating so priming was a mood lifting moment. Painting the details was even more fun.

Green green rockets

My first idea was to use blu-tack to stick everything for painting, but I had thrown mine out as it had dried completely. It was about 23 years old, so it wasn't a huge surprise. Instead I used a few old pegs and brushed the rockets green (VMA 71022 Light Green).

When the warheads were dry, I painted the remaining parts. I painted the rocket engine nozzles dark grey just to get them a bit different. Before installing these into their crates I had to gloss varnish them, apply decals, and matt varnish them to seal the show. I still hadn't invested into the decal solutions, so I was using just water and very limited patience.

Rocket crates

This solution cannot have surprised anyone: I started the painting of the crates with dark grey (VMA 71055 Black Grey RLM66) a piece at a time. Some of them I had to touch up a few times, some of the more difficult crevices didn't want to accept paint that easily, and I didn't notice that from more than a few limited angles. For example, this photo here showed a bit of plain metal in the rightmost crate's left bottom edge.

In between all the other pieces I patched my rocket crates first with black where I saw plain or almost plain metal. The frame edges I painted with the dark grey, not aiming for perfection but decent looks, piece by piece. I still had a few steps of that work to go, especially if I wanted to get dents or scratches on my boxes. With the assembly results not many extra dents were even needed anymore.

Posture test fit

Trying out a random crate, this one was a bit difficult to align with the hands of the guys. Or maybe their hands were poorly aligned when I built the humanoids. Right now I just wanted to see how this looked in general.

 

Preparing the wood painting

Over the black primer I airbrushed some off-white (VMA 71119 White Grey) to get as simple starting point as possible. The wood had been difficult in the past, so I was worried of this prominent detail. A white basecoat was what the video clip I linked to the last time was suggesting so I wanted to give it a go.

Personell process

While playing with the airbrush and white paint I also prepared my five plastic nazis. I aimed downwards from high angles, my goal being strongish light/shadow effects as a base, on which I could just apply thin layers of colours. Or then I'd use contrast paints that I didn't own at this point, so maybe not that.

Once again I was dry-fitting to see how mimicking the box art felt like:

Decals

There were only four decals in this whole set. I prepared my suffering with a layer of Vallejo's Gloss Varnish on the rockets. This was done like the painting, in two stages, to ensure full and messless coverage.

When the varnish had flashed, I sliced off the two decals of each of the rocket types, which left me with a backup copy of each. Just in case I cocked this up somehow. For a change I didn't feel bad about the decal application process, as they set in place pretty nicely.

With the decals dry I dullcoated them in two stages. This time I used AK Interactive's Super Matt varnish.

Extremely funnily three of the rockets fit inside their Packkiste crates, one of them didn't. Or to be more exact, that one Packkiste couldn't accept a rocket. This one rocket was going to be the one that was being tweaked by the launcher.

I might have been a tiny bit agitated, had more than one of the rockets been left out of their crates. The rockets looked decent already, but the crates needed more care and weathering. Maybe I was going to come up with something silly for the rockets as well.

Launcher's priming

In the core of blackness

Predictably I had had enough of swearing with the PE bits, so as soon as I could declare them done I started pondering on the painting processes. It was going to start with a primer, that being Vallejo's black primer again. And that was where the certainty also ended, as the follow-up steps were full of questions and uncertainties.

280mm and 320mm rockets

The rockets got painted in three sets, but I kept on holding, like the photo here showed, with my nitrile gloved fingers from the nozzle end. To finish those bits up I had no time when I had to stop airbrushing, so they had to wait for the next session.

I believed that these had to be painted green in the end, except maybe for the nozzles of the rocket engine. At this point I was interested in knowing if the barrel and the warhead body were of different materials and therefore of different colours. I had to investigate that, but my expectation was "they were all the same".

Personell

Like the rockets, I painted the little nazis in three stages as well. First from one side, then left them to dry while I primed some other bits. When the carousel had taken a full round, I flipped the guys around and blasted from the opposite end. On the last blast I fixed what I had missed before, if there was anything left unpainted.

An A stand for Ammunition

In the real world I started my painting operation from the rack, but that made no difference to the photos or this text here. Like the previous two subgroups, I airbrushed the rack in three separate runs.

This photo didn't show the homemade woodgrain effect, but maintaining it was the reason why I started priming with the airbrush in the first place instead of quickly paintbrushing the coatings on. Painting that wood was the next scary thing, but I was thinking of giving Uncle Night Shift's semirecent method ("I Made A Diorama From Google Street View!" from Nov 2023, linked to 22min 11sec) of oil painting wood texture on carved plastic. Of course I could also give another shot at the AK Interactive's wood colours but drybrushing this time instead of making an ugly wet mess.

Crates

My rocket crates were, thanks to the shapes and overlapping bars, the most difficult ones to prime. I left them to dry and thought that I'd brush any missing primer the next time. Otherwise I'd lose my nerves and an unacceptable amount of time. Already at this stage they were, I was happy to notice, looking much better. Just having the superglue frosting gone from the visible surfaces was a source of happiness to me.

Had I thought of the crates a bit more and in peace, I might have considered adding some surface texturing on them, using the Night Shift method. But thinking of how annoying building them without good tools was, and how much superglue (too much) I had resorted to using, maybe it was wise to ignore that idea without even thinking of it to begin with. I wasn't usually in the habit of digging blood from my nose, not with a prybar or without.

Panzer IV detailing

Grabbing a paintbrush and brushing around

After the basic paintjob the model was practically a large lump of yellowishness and I was to move forward from that. The roundels and other right-angular markings were to be done now so I didn't forget them. With the metallics I was going to stay on my current course and paint them dark grey. The few wooden parts were a large question mark but I expected them to end up being tolerable after a few steps.

Palms first

From my stencils even the smallest DAK palm tree didn't fit into the middle of the turret the way the instructions suggested. Instead I said screw it and moved the veggies into the front corners.

On the right edge the tree worked well. To compensate the left edge's plant flowed over badly, I hadn't paid enough attention on the tight fit of the stencil. So, repainting coming up.

These were only placed on the turret. That was a good thing, as there wasn't that much space on the tank after all. On the second painting round the left edge's tiny nazi tree settled nicely, even better than its friend.

The Balkenkreuz, part 1

The count of Wehrmacht's Balkenkreuz was three: to the front side edges of the hull and one in the rear plate.

A pattern was emerging: my stencils weren't pressed tightly enough against the model's surface, only the butt-end's marking was successful on the first attempt. The right edge's version wasn't pretty but might be acceptable when the black inner cross was painted in.

The funniest thing was that when I finally got to paint the black crosses, the side marking got clearly improved but the rear one was totally ruined (there was no space for the alignment piece, and I didn't paint them even during the same week) and I had to cover it up with sandy yellow.

Return rollers and road wheels

While waiting for my white markings to dry I thought that the rubbery colour (VMA 71315 Tire Black) was maybe a self-explanatory paint for the softer parts of the various wheels. I started with the outer roadwheels, then iterated through the return rollers, and returned to paint the inner roadwheels. My mistake was to use a slightly suboptimal paintbrush with the spock-shape that produced a couple of annoying misstrokes that had to be fixed. Sigh. One day I'd learn.

Fixing the tire black wasn't a big operation. My return rollers had a couple of underpainted bits so they needed to be completed.

Tools and other unpainted metal things

Now I started painting the unpainted metallic items with Dark Grey RLM66, starting from the radio guy's machine gun and the various tools on that corner like the axe, startup crank and the whatever iron lived between them.

 

The right side also had the radio antenna, of which I only painted the hinge, as I wanted to avoid making a mess. I also wasn't entirely sure of its colour so I didn't want to guess wrong and decided to doublecheck from ddg instead. Located below the antenna's resting place there was a wrench of some sort that most likely doubled as a melee weapon.

 

In the rear end I painted the first layer of the exhaust pipe/drum.

Still using my spock-y brush I continued to the left side. During this session I only got to paint some of the topmost S-hook, a wrench, part of a crowbar and the other long wrench along with the wire cutter's bare metal parts. Each of those still needed work on them, just like I needed to think of what kind of a jack block I wanted to attempt to paint this time. The fire extinguisher I knew to leave basecoated.

For better accuracy in painting the tiny bits the next day I switched to a smaller paintbrush and kept on tinkering. I still hadn't even thought about the wood colour yet, and therefore not even started painting any of it. This time I thought I'd use the same setup for each of them. Then I had to paint the wire cutter's handles reddish and the bakelite caps with a different dark grey.

 

While going through the bare steel I also painted the leaf springs of the bogies. Most likely none of this would be visible later on, but at least they were done.

Wooden things

Yeah, the wooden things have been among the most challenging parts. I took out the AK's warm wood shades box again and thought I'd follow the barrel example with three colours: the darkest (AK11108 Hull Red) for the woodgrain, the middle tone (AK11351 Wood Base) as the self-declared base colour and the lightest (AK11115 Light Earth) for highlights.

I started by painting the jack block's wood parts, then the handles of the axe and the shovel, and while I was aware of things, also the pipe cleaner's wooden multipart rod's wooden parts. While playing with these wood colours I chose the reddest of them (AK11106 Mahogany) for the wire cutter's handles, it was red enough to act as the handle's base colour.

After allowing for the paint to cure I then painted the base colour on all of the woods. I tried to leave some darkness showing through, but as always, at this stage the results were suspicious. Again while watching the paint dry I fixed or improved some of the bare metals, like the axe's blade. I also painted the jack block's metal structs and the pipe cleaner's brass bits which I wasn't going to paint with a brass paint this time around.

As I was working with the metallic parts I also checked if any of the periscopes were visible. Unlike on a Jagdpanzer IV there weren't many here so I just painted the driver's scope dark grey. The radio operator's machine gun was a bit too mild-looking so I mixed some tire black into the RLM66 to get a bit darker dark grey and used that.

Then I did some highlights with the lightest of my lightest wood paint on the wood parts. Maybe they ought to get another layer of the darkest one before a wash. Hm.

While pondering on that I spent a moment to paint the barrel cleaner's protective bag/sack with a dark green (VMA 71019 Camouflage Dark Green) to make it stand out a bit from all the other dark grey. That might require another layer or perhaps drybrushing with a gently toned-up paint.

My fire extinguisher looked a bit boring being completely sandy yellow, but I thought that had I painted that, too, with dark grey, it'd been like another of those tools (based on my ddg'ing and reading these things were either the hull colour or dark grey). This was a correct approach, but just so boring to paint :D

To take the brightness of the wooden parts down a bit I did apply a new layer of the darkest paint to play the part of the woodgrain like I was pondering a bit earlier. This seemed to be a tolerable trick, now the light parts didn't jump out as badly. The wire cutter's bakelite caps I painted with tire black, it was different enough from the rest of the dark grey.

Changing my mind about the turret internals

My evening painting session was otherwise done but I still had a couple of minutes to waste, so I poked into the turret after all. Of the three periscopes I painted a part with dark grey. Then I painted the breech block's opening/closing lever to make it stand out better. The breech block itself I painted steel (VMA 71065 Steel). Still, none of this was ever to be seen, so this was just me taking more steps into the completionist's madness.

Balkenkreuz, part 2

For a short moment I wrestled between my laziness and my goals. I liked the idea of slapping a Balkenkreuz into the back of the vehicle, especially as it was dropped from the left side due to space issues.

Most of the time went into searching for the edge marker's place, because I couldn't do this so that I'd started with that and then set the centerpoint of the cross. Instead I aligned the edge marker by the outer cross' stencil (white) and then taped the stencil paranoidly tightly and applied the (awful) painter's tape all around. I needed less than one drop of white paint, and I thought it dried in place even without the air blasting I did.

Right away I swapped the center (black) cross stencil in place and as madly as before, and again one drop of paint was much more than what I needed. Now it looked good.

Who would've thought that when this got done calmly and carefully in one go without issues (and still quickly), I saved more time than rushing and fixing repeatedly?

Dry fitting

Now this model was in a stage that the weathering was the next larger step, and to aid that I thought I'd apply gloss varnish over the whole damn thing. I also needed to think about weathering in advance, because I wanted to get a hold of the Panzerwanne's sides without issues, so I had to leave the tracks and related bits still off the tank.

This stage of the project was finished by blasting a layer of Vallejo's Gloss Varnish (70510) all around the turret, hull, roadwheels (which stayed nicely kept in place in my masking tape setup). Using the gloss varnish was to help with the oil washing that was coming up next, if my glossy layer was decent.