Engineer tools

Shovels and other sledgehammerlikes

With the camo business out of the way I started on the deck details, this time meaning the wooden parts of the engineer tools. On the front deck we had an axe, a sledgehammer and a shovel. At the rear deck, next to the fan we had some pruning shears, or most likely something to cut barbed wire instead but the hell if I knew how to call those. Each got their handles painted dark brown (the VMA's Mahogany I had used previously). I thought I'd drybrush some lighter brown later to get a bit of the wood effect.

Each of the metallic attachment bits I left untouched, so they remained camouflaged. Earlier I had thought of leaving all the solid bits dark yellow, as the tank's basecoat was, to make them look separately painted, but it didn't sound good enough now.

Black metal with wood

Each metallic bit got painted with the metallic black. On the first round I forgot, of course, that there was a metal rod on the right rear edge of the tank, as you could see below. 

I wanted the fire extinguisher to be a bit more subdued on the outer deck than inside the tank. That's why I basecoated the tool with the interior's red-brown instead of a bright red. Then I painted the bands and the valve thing with the metallic black.

As soon as my metallics had cured I drybrushed the wooden parts with a lighter brown (VMA 71077 Wood) to bring more life to the very dark brown surface. As said before, I left the connectors in peace.

After a couple of fixing rounds I remembered to paint the missing metal rod. On the fire extinguisher I drybrushed some brighter red for a bit of highlighting, as the red-brown was a bit too dark. My goal was to keep it darker and prevent it becoming an eyesore.

A bonus thing

Before sealing the turret for good I painted all of the tank's periscope lenses on the inside and the outside of the tank with metallic black. If my memory served they ought have been clear or green-tinted (that I'd done with steel/chrome + wash, but as I hadn't bothered masking the transparent bits and fight with the tapes after countless days, painting and gluing rounds), this time I decided to implement my periscope effect as dark. I didn't want to use flat black, because that has never looked smart, even with a bit of varnish.

 

Camouflaging the largest of kitties

A basic Dunkelgelb base

Before starting I covered the already painted topside with a healthy amount of masking tape and blasted the outside of the Panzerwanne with dark yellow, and fixed the subpar paintjob on  the front- and rear glacis plates. At this point I didn't spend much time on the road arms, as I was going to retouch them before installing the road wheels*.

*) I've been suspiciously quiet about them for ages

I also covered the rest of the turret's outer shell, finished up the upper hull's shadowed areas and finally did something on the idler wheels and drive sprockets. These photos ended up missing the road wheels that I now painted from each side, once. Speaking of the road wheels I read that in the early production runs they had rubber rims, later they were steel-rimmed. In my project I was leaning towards steely road wheels, to get some variety in my builds, if nothing else.

 

The turret's inner ring was at this point still largely untouched, as the photo showed. I thought that I'd fix it so that on the inside it'd be white and on the outside red-brown. Its teeth would get a bit of metallic drybrushing and as my oily liquid was ruined, I'd use a black or most likely a brown wash.

 

Set aside the differences between these cat pieces was astonishing. Based on my ammorackless dry-fittings the turret's shell fit tolerably on its base and with only a bit of force used. The only large problem so far was the tank's upper hull that didn't settle on the lower hull at all without threatening to break something.

 

I wasn't going to  paint the engineer tools until the camo was done, here I had wanted to check how the intended look would work on the shovel. The bare metal part I painted with the metallic black instead of gunmetal or plain steel, as in my mind the darker base colour would work better on a camouflaged tank, as opposed to a shiny clean one.

 

The rest of the three-tone camo

Since I changed my airbrush bits from Super Fine to Fine, I thought that I wouldn't try to make a very detailed pattern without masking. On the other hand I didn't feel like having a sharp-edged pattern this time, either, so redoing one of those was going to wait for another tank.

My fresh camo paint set had a couple of options for the colours. In addition to the Panzergrau there were two different greens, browns and a sand/ivory to be used instead of the omnipresent Dunkelgelb. The dark yellow had been chosen ages ago, of the browns I chose the armour brown and from the greens I went with the olive green.

Anyone could tell that I have never been an artist, so I went for something pretty simple. I painted more or less equidistant stripes of green (VMA 71092 Medium Olive) across the hull, the turret and the gun barrel. Between the greens I painted, using circular motion, similar-shaped brown (VMA 71041 Armour Brown) stripes while leaving variying-width dark yellow spaces between every block.

On the Royal Tiger's hull I painted the front glacis plates and the rear armour plate, while leaving the bottom and the armoured tub's lower sides untouched. I didn't even want to get a uniform, continuous pattern between the upper hull, turret and the barrel. On the road wheels I tried to break the round forms with some haphazard brown and green sectors, stripes and blobs. A couple of the road wheels I even left dark yellow for variety. Of course I left (read: I forgot) the drive sprockets and the idler wheels untouched, so I had to return to them still.

Later I was looking at the deck and thought that a small fine-tuning session might be needed. A very small extra brown stripelet could find a nice living space in the rear, just like in the left front. Maybe the first two frontmost brown stripes (the one that crosses the radio operator's machine gun and the one that went across the turret's opening) could use a bit of deshaping - they looked a bit too uniform and solid. Also a couple of the dark yellow bands were quite narrow and low on intensity.

 

My turret with its barrel looked pretty neat already, even if I only took a photo to show the right side only. The pattern didn't need any changes at all, a bit of touching up if anything.

 

All in all the whole upper hull was pretty good. Doing the fixes I was pondering a couple of paragraphs earlier didn't bother me at all, but not doing them wouldn't ruin the tank either. Still I knew myself and that if I didn't fix the things that I knew no one would pay attention to, they would bother me until I had to fix them at some point anyway.

 

Yay, my camo pattern was pretty much done in one go, which was quite baffling if you thought how much tweaking, reworking and multistage-painting this model had required so far. After my fixes I'd apply a wash and then do some edge highlighting.

 

Some fixing

I was very content with the camo pattern, after another day I couldn't fing much to tweak. I strenghtened a couple of the less-covered bits where the brown or green didn't cover as much of the dark yellow basecoat as they should've. There were a few places, both on the hull and on the turret.

 

On the hull I modified the stripes I had complain-commented about earlier. Now the first two brown stripes were less arrow-straight and uniform in their respective widths. Around the second line I also reinforced the dark yellows, as they had ended up a bit too narrow for my liking. To break the third main brown stripe I added a tiny sliver of dark yellow to break the widest brown patch.

 

Now that I remembered, I added some camo effects on the final wheelsprockets. I followed the same nonexistent plan as with the road wheels: don't make them exact copies of each other.

Final touches

Slightly off-topic I noticed that the outer edges of the turret's base had ended up white. I painted them with the red-brown to follow my approach from the lower hull. Now it felt that my eyes got a better hold of the part, as the essential bits were properly colour-coded.

 

Painting the Henschel turret interior and the KwK

A creamy turret

My simple plan for the interior painting was pretty much this: "just follow the instructions". Without any better knowledge on my part, I thought it was wise to not make stuff up.

I started this by basecoating the only primed bits from the turret, the Panzeregranate shelves, and the tail end of the cannon with white, now with a different shade because my VMA Grauweiß bottle's cap had cracked and the paint had dried a bit too much to flow nicely through the airbrush. As a replacement I used the paint I had actually ordered for this project, the cream white (VMA 71270 White) that worked just great.

The outer walls of the ammo racks I painted red brown (VMA 71271 German Red Brown) like I did with the hull's outside facing edges. My paint coverage wasn't perfect but that wasn't my primary goal, I just wanted to make my paintbrushing stage that much simpler. While I was airburshing around, I changed my mind again and, after all, painted the bottom of the turret's basked red brown to follow the general directions better. Any overflow and badly made maskings I was still going to fix by hand.

Detail-level tweaking

The next time I was painting some various details that caught my eyes and that I felt like emphasizing inside the turret. On the loader's side, on the rear arc there was a set of angular pieces that I believed to be related to the shells for the Nahverteidigungswaffe, which I then painted with metallic black. After taking these photos I also did the same for the coaxial machine gun's ejected shell casing capturing funnel (?)'s insides.

While working on the turret's basked I fixed the edges between the creamy and red-brown areas and the surfaces I had oversprayed with the airbrush. Despite the instructions telling me to paint the seat complexes completely black, I decided to leave the parts that I thought to pose more of a knee-bump risk as white, while the cushions and "step on this to climb" parts were painted black.

Of the central machinery I painted some of the floor-based pieces with engine grey, in my attempt to reach even a low level of uniformity. The control wheel edges I painted black, for accessibility purposes instead of leaving them monocoloured.

At this point I thought the tank cannon 43 was pretty much completed. The lock I painted red brown, and its immediate neighbour areas I painted with gunmetal, as instructed. Now I noticed that the gun sight's eyepiece should've been painted black over a larger area, so I had to remember to to that the next time I was painting.

Of the inner turret I mostly painted just a couple of silly details, like the edges of some hatch handles that I painted metallic black. I took the same approach to this fire extinguisher as below the deck: the body was bright red, the attachment collars and the top vent were metallic black. This individual had a creamy white bottom support, I could've also done it red, I guess.

I didn't spend as much time with the coaxial machine gun as I did with the radio person's machine gun. Just for the fun of it I tried how it looked like in metallic black instead of flat black with drybrushed gunmetal. It looked good too, perhaps a bit less weathered. That worked well in the theme, as this machine gun was mostly going to live inside the turret. Or that's how I felt when I was spinning the protostory of this tank in my mind.

Ammo painter in action, part II 

The turret's ammo rack was going to be done a bit differently from the hull's racks. I didn't want to follow the instructions and make them all black-green. Instead, I decided that they both would have mostly black shells and a few copper-cartridged ones to bring more life to the setup. In the photo below I had a single layer of both metallic blac and bright brass on the cartridges.

Oh boy, this was going to take some time. The brass was likely to require at least three layers to look like something better than this garbage. The grenades I would most likely paint in a single quick action, unlesss I got some more "great ideas" in the middle of it. After I had those finished I'd just paint the racks themselves white and then I would just need to fix the missing or mispainted red brown edges.

Attaching the cannon

Before trying to do anything else I attached the white-painted cannon holders onto the cannon. Getting them nicely on was difficult as the fit was tight and the coaxial machine gun was just a bit on the way (I should've thought of it and glued it on afterwards). As soon as I got the angles and positions ok, I glued the bits onto the turret.

Weathering a bit

So that I wouldn't forget it completely, while I was fooling around with flat black (the gun sight's underpainted end) I drybrushed some black in choice spots to the end of the cannon, and around the turret control surfaces. I started pondering if the breech block's manual raise/lower lever should get painted red or (dark) yellow. These things had some use in a real situation, which is why I felt it could benefit from a bit of a highlight.

This pure and clean area needed something, like light staining all around and paint flaking especially near the ammunition storage. Should my old Vallejo Weathering Effects oil stains and such still be alive and useful, they'd love to live in here. Lightly applied, of course, I didn't want my precious tank to look like a trashbin of an abandoned fuel station's outhouse.

Paint chips and engine grime

For the chipped paint effect I dug out a piece of foam from my random crap -stash and tore a rough-edged triangular piece. I dipped a corner into grey paint (VMA 71056 German Dark Grey), wiped most of it off and dabbed around in places that felt that would be subjected to lots of bumps and hits. The end result was to be a chipped / flaky paint effect.

In a text block earlier I was thinking of my Weathering Effects products, the fate of the oily one (VWE:Engine 73813 Oil Stains) had been grim: over the years its components had separated and too much of the solvent had evaporated. No matter how stronly I shook and rolled, I didn't manage to revive it. Pity, as it was fantastic stuff.

The other one (VWE:E 73815 Engine Grime) was in a much better state and that I applied to the cylinders and on the outer edge of the PE rim you could see in the bottom center of the next photo. It wasn't quite as awesome as the oil stains, but nicely shitty anyway!

I had also pondered earlier whether I should paint the lock's lever red or not, but I decided it wasn't that dangerous (also, based on my limited experience with field guns, they weren't made to look scary) there was no need for an alarming red here. Not very shockingly I painted the lever with dark yellow, to make it stand out enough in a rushed space, but not too much.

Ammo racks

The other evening I spent about fifteen minutes fixing the ammo racks, I mostly painted the racks themselves white (using the same VMA Grey White I had used as a base white earlier in this project), and checked that the shell tips were as they were expected to be. The black-cartridged shells had a steel ballistic cap, the brass-cartridged had a black one.

After I had glued the last ammo racks into the back end of the turret, I noticed that I had made a silly little mistake when painting the inner edges of the turret's inner wall white - I had meant to paint them red-brown like the outer edges of the shell racks. This way the turret and the hull would have been painted the same way.

Luckily that was just a tiny tweak, and none of them should ever be visible to anyone, but as always: I would know they were done right. The way I planned.

Creamy royally tigerish workspaces

Off-white for the combatants

Inside the turret

The turret's shell had spent a good amount of time painted white on the inside, but as I had reprimed the untouched parts the last time I now blasted them all with off-white. This wasn't the first time I was shaking my head at my earlier as-if-optimizing.

The turret's bottom and basket with its machinery got their first white paint layers. I knew I had to paint the bottom and rear plate of the basket by paintbrush anyway, but so I would be painting the machinery as well, so it was all the same at this point. The cannon's axle-attachment pieces I had painted separately so that I wouldn't ruin their attachment surfaces at an unfortunate moment.

Untextured cannon

Basecoating the tank cannon was simply as the whole thing had to be white. The gunner's sight and the coaxial machine gun were the noticeable not-white bits in this set, and they weren't large entities themselves. Of course I was going to attempt to make this more believable with the handles and bars, but colour photos of this stuff for reference wasn't really lined up by the thousands.

Starting with the priming and basecoating

Dark yellow at long last!

The lower hull

These photos ended up being taken out of order, this time the first text had the newest photos. I started this part by carefully airbrushing the lower hull with Dunkelgelb (VMA 71025 Dark Yellow). The lower hull could've been basecoated weeks or months ago already, but I had left the external painting on purpose until now.

My plan was to keep the bottom and the sides of the Panzerwanne dark yellow and implement any sort of camouflage to the road-, idler wheels, drive sprockets, the front and rear glacis plates and to the upper hull and the turret.

The turret

My painting session had been started by priming the turret from the outside (VSP 70642 Pure Red) and the inside (VSP 70627 Skeleton Bone). While the primers were drying, I painted some other pieces and finally, while I still had some Dunkelgelb in my airbrush's paint cup, I painted most of the turret's outsides as well with the basecoat. After the first run the coverage wasn't perfect, and that was expected.

The upper hull

I had been patching up the upper hull's unprimed bits (the engineer tools at least needed priming) with the red primer. The upper hull I also painted flat dark yellow, even as it could've been basecoated with brown just as well, as I was going to do a three-tone camo. Somehow I had just gotten used to the dark yellow as the base, so I didn't even think much.

The cannon and the inner turret, round 1

This subset I knew I'd be priming and basecoating at least twice before I got anywhere. You could tell from the photos where I had been holding from while doing the priming. The rear end of the cannon was surprisingly fun to paint despite all the weird shapes it had. Painting the ammo racks for the turret was going to be mostly paintbrush work, the best I could do with the airbrush was the starting point.

I ended up priming the turret complex with the bone primer, because the amount of red-brown was going to be so small that worrying about the old red primer made absolutely no sense at all. There were a few of the attachment points that I was going to have to clean up later on, just like the photoetch pieces I had to remember to retouch on the next round.