Devastators first lance painting

The first four

It was a solemn moment, starting something completely new and all without any kind of pre-given specifications or even plans for a paint scheme. Even if I had played with this unit on the computer, the schemes always came from the game's patterns and therefore had their own limits. Now I had to come up with something that I could both implement and repeat in the real world. Phew.

Somehow shockingly the German three-tone camo was an overall style I had paints for in my stash, and that was nicely different from all the other BT paintjobs I had attempted so far. Then, from some weird depths of my brain I thought of the digicamo that I had once tried out and decided to be fun. So why not try it on something as tiny as these bits here?

A sand yellow base

I decided to start with the lightest shade, so I airbrushed all the miniatures with a Sand Yellow (VMA 71278). This was a nice, quick basecoat.

Another and completely opposite approach would've been to do green or brown, then cover some of that with masking tape, then paint with the other colour, mask even more, and then finish with the tiniest surface area of sand yellow. My memory told me I did this in a slightly inconvenient way the last time so maybe this was a better order of busines. Or I misremembered misremembering and accidentally did the exact same thing I did the last time.

Masking

The last time I made painting masks for minis I made tiny triangles and some sort of waveshapes. Now I'd do the same but only using squares or as squarelike things I could manage with an exacto knife. First I laid down about a 10cm straight run of Tamiya's 10mm masking tape and started cutting it into squares along the cutting mat's lines. Then I cut them in two horizontally and a few times vertically. Now I had a good number of about 2,5mm pieces to get started.

During the first hours I got one Devastator and one Marauder mostly masked.

At that point I needed more tape squares so I did pretty much the same but cut a number of them into even smaller pieces which gave me 1,25mm squares for smaller surfaces. Even if I had two Assault- and Heavy -class 'Mechs, these tiniest tape bits were pretty large considering the scale. Imagine these on a truly tiny miniature like a Locust or a Flea.

After a second evening of painstaking sticker-placement I had a mummified Lance. No one else, were they an innocent bystander or a colleague who heard my description, considered this stuff calming and almost meditative behaviour. I just sat and applied pieces of masking tape to where they felt they wanted to settle on, a bit like if Bob Ross was applying them instead of painting.

 

Camouflage: Soviet green

Judging my pre-selected medium greens I also tested how they compared. Of the three options I had at hand the Soviet Protective Green 4BO (VMA 71017) looked like it worked best with my current mood. That decided I loaded up my airbrush and blasted away.

 

This process wasn't planned carefully for a three-tone scheme, because the paint covered the masking tapes really, really well. From this state adding more tape to protect the green layer didn't work too well because I'd been doing it blind.

Of course I could've just added some random pixels and leave multi-edged gaps and get an acceptable result. I just wanted to see and know better what I was doing, instead of doing a luck-based third layer. I pulled of all the tape pieces and declared being done with it at least three times, and still found some well-hidden tiny ones after that :D

Demasking

Of course I was taking photos at all sorts of stages, these photos here were after the second camo layer. The funniest thing was that the masking tape bits didn't catch my bare and bad eyes while being painfully obvious on screen, even on the phone. This set of four photos showed you immediately at least 8 mask pieces.

 

All in all they looked neat with the first attempt at a small-scale digicamo. Of course the planned brown would've given more variety, but even a two-colour effect was quite fun.

Metallic surfaces 

On the bare metal parts I was following my very familiar dark grey (VMA 71056 Black Grey) path. Devastators had lots of obvious barrels, also they had some in their heads and backs that I might've not recognized. In addition to those I painted the various grilles and vents that looked approrpiate. Of their arms I painted the elbow actuators differently on each 'Mech: one got the whole complex in raw metal, the other just got the smaller and more hingelike part metallified.

My Marauders sadly had fewer clearly unpainted parts. I did the ankles, the rear hull's vents and whatever caught my eye. On a touchup round I also did the intakes by the cockpits, they just felt like it even if I had camouflaged them earlier.

Then I drybrushed the dark greys with cold grey for a bit of metallic sheen. That gave me the idea of testing a light drybrushing over the light-catching surfaces of one of the Marauders, and that worked nicely. I proceeded to do that on the rest. Finally I took some more photos and still found more tape pieces!

At this point I still wasn't sure if I wanted to add a few Panzerbraun pixels in some random spots or not. I had been flipflopping between yes and no quite heavily depending on the viewing angles and the lighting conditions.

Marauder dorsal guns

Having ignored them for long, I had to start painting the four dorsal guns. I really should've done them along with the minis themselves but I hadn't taken them out for painting and they were, like I said, simply ignored. My fault for being dumb.

 

Instead of starting with the Sand Yellow I just painted them mostly Black Grey. The sandy parts got done in a couple of brushed-on layers, because I didn't feel like setting up the airbrushing stuff for eight puffs of paint, even if that would've guaranteed a much nicer coating.

So yeah, I was thinking that the dorsal guns would be mostly bare metal and only the breech area would be hull-like. Over a basic brushjob I'd drybrush for highlights to get them to the same state with the hulls.

Window bases

In preparation for the jeweling I painted the viewports and gun ports black.

Panzer browning after all

Like I had written earlier, I had been going back and forth about the brown pixels. Finally I decided to add a few per 'Mech. I outlined a handful of various shapes onto each of them:

Instead of airbrushing or paintbrushing I went with the sponge ( VMC 70826  German Camo Brown) to fill the outlined pixels. After a bit of flashing time I removed the tapes, and while taking these off I still found individuals I had not encountered on the previous three, four times!

This was a very good place for a break.

StuG III Ausf. G tracks

Panzer III/IV type 6B w/cleats

I ordered two identical sets of tracks, even though I considered getting the Winterketten for one of the targets. There'd be time for those later on, now I simply didn't feel it.

Track assembly

Based on my eyeballed measures I decided that about 28cm per side was a good first goal for the track lenght, and then continue from that a link or a couple at a time until reaching the proper lenght. Because of this I did not glue the wheelsets into the StuG, as that made playing with the tracks so much easier. The guesstimated 28cm was three roadwheelfuls too short, as the photo showed, so I assembled more until I did get the ends joined. The actual lenght was ~33cm which gave me some looseness for a bit of sag.

With the tracks built to a good length and repeatedly dry-fitted, A/B pins correctly aligned and the first-buit track marked on the right (the left side when facing forward) side, I could paint them. In addition to the driving tracks I built two short bits of track armour to be hanged on the back wall of the casemate.

Track painting

To keep the tracks somehow in control while painting them I simply laid a decent length of painter's tape with the glue side up, and taped that from the ends onto the instructions. It was going to hold the tracks nicely enough for some airbrushing.

I started, somewhat obviously, with thin layers of Vallejo's black primer. While working on them I took a number of WIP photos but maybe one here was going to be sufficient: 

Over the black I airbrushed some black grey (VMA 71056 Black Grey) to act as the bare steel, in somewhat nebulous pattern. In my mind that gave these tracks a bit of a surface texture.

This time I really had to remember that also the closing pins needed to be painted so they wouldn't stand out in their greyness from the finished model. I kept repeating this to myself constantly, because I knew my weaknesses or at least a couple of them.

Dirt foundation

Weathering the tracks got started with a really thinned down brown (VMC 70826 German Camo Medium Brown) to get some kind of a long-lived earth and dirtiness over the steel tracks. As a colour I believed Chocolate Brown would've worked even better but I also thought this sort of a brown was going to work nicely as well. Later on I could and would add darker brown for fresh, wet mud/earth.

I wasn't going to go far with the weathering while the tracks were laid open, because weathering needed to be done when the build was done and the aforementioned last pins were also painted and not shining like a kilo of radium in the night. These two track armour pieces didn't of course take the same kind of weathering that the running tracks did, but I started the same way anyway.

Gunmetal for the polished inner parts

I started by thinning down gunmetal (VMA 71072 Gunmetal) mostly because I knew my paint to be a few years old, and also the thinner paint wasn't going to be a bad idea. Those guiding teeth were a handy detail to start with, so I didn't test anything on the most visible details.

After the teeth were done I checked with a road wheel what part of the inner track was going to be ground clean while driving. Just about the full flat surface, just as one could've expected. 

With that checked I painted the metal band with the thinned-down paint, applying a cautious layer. Of course I hadn't really seen a running tank close by in almost 25 years and even then I didn't pay attention to those parts, so the realism or believability of this approach was based on assumptions. I thought this'd look better than the pure steel bands I painted some years ago on the German-captured IS-2.

Earthy tones

After that was done I closed up the tracks and painted the pins with black grey right away. Then I drybrushed the outer and side edges and that was simple enough with the loops. Before I was going to install the tracks on the assault gun, I painted a layer of heavily thinned down dirty brown (VMA 71133 Dirt).

Track attachment

Installing the tracks was pretty simple this time, thanks to me not gluing the return rollers or any others yet. My track had more lenght than I thought it did, these photos showed all the looseness hanging below the road wheels due to the installation order. I left the wheels and their glue to flash, I didn't want to accidentally plop anything out while readjusting the tracks.

 

The next evening I glued the road wheels onto the tracks to secure the sag in the correct part, so it hung from the return rollers. If something started bothering me, I could still readjust later.

This was enough of track play for the time being. Making them messier was going to happen when the rest of the vehicle was getting weathered.

StuG III Ausf. G paintjob

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.