Lehman Russ Afrika Korps Green Scheme Take 2

My first attempt at a dark sand and green scheme LR was not fondly received, so I thought I would take another stab at it. I spread out the camouflage lines this time in order to let more of the color modulated yellow color to show through. A little web researched showed that the early german tanks in Tunisia had the option of green or grey camouflage over the brown/yellow base coat.

There were a couple of areas I struggled with on this model in addition to the camo. The first was the spotlight. I painted it black/grey in order to have it painted, but ideally I would rather of had it been covered. I like painting lenses, and small lights, but large lights look weird to me when they are painted as if they were glowing. I thought about painting the light various shades of silver as a way to show the reflective part at the back of the lens, and then heavily gloss it. That might be a way to go forward in the future.

Yesterday the great Simple Green bath of tanks finally finished eating away 19 years worth of paint. The griffin that just finished soaking has a 1995 mark on it! I'm tempted to build more griffin's just because the model is so cool. After watching orange scented simple green eat through dozens of layers of paint and glue, my wife decided that every tupperware container used had to go. So it looks like I have finally procured storage for my hobby room!

FW Hydra Defense Battery German Color Scheme

This is another salvage piece from my old IG army. After a bath in 99% alcohol, most of the original paint came off. What I was left with was the original badly weapon arms. Despite that, I really enjoyed painting this piece. If the details had been sharper I would have tried adding some green camo, but as it stands I think it came out pretty nicely. The stowage, spreader bars, and oil barrel are not completed yet, but with their base coats on, I wanted to share what an old school FW hydra could look like.

I am still getting the hang of painting battle damage on with a brush rather than with a sponge or with real chipping. I quite like the process. The total control coupled with tedium makes it sort of like meditating.

On The Painting Table

Since photos of painters workspaces are so popular, I thought I would share mine. Yep, zero space. I've managed to completely fill an 8 foot table with a variety of projects. What you see here is my repaint of my IG tanks. In this photo each step of the painting process can be seen. I think my next job is to clean up my workspace! After that, some Nova Charitable Foundation Work. I've got a Knight Titan with LED's ready to hit the paint phase.

Lehman Russ Panzer Pt 2 With Color Modulation

When I first painted the sand colored LR and the turret with the green camo, my wife immediately liked the green. I was on the fence, but such a strong reaction led me to a paint test. The completed LR battle tank above is the result of that. Funny enough, when my wife saw the completed tank she immediately disliked it. We both got a good laugh out of it!

So despite one vote against it, I like the green scheme, but it might be the only tank that gets it. I just enjoy weathering the cleaner sand colored tanks more.

The LR punisher above is an example of the first stage for any vehicle attached to my DKoK force. That tank is a salvage vehicle from a previous color scheme, which is why you see some other colors peeking through. Even at this stage of painting, the tank looks really interesting. That is due to two things. The first is color modulation. Dark Yellow was used as the base coat followed by light sand which was applied as to produce a gradient between panels. This produced the color modulation that you see.  After that an oil pin wash finished up this stage of painting, bringing out all of the detail, and highlighting those gradient shifts.

So what to do now? Do I paint one of these guys up in a sand/grey paint schem? If anyone has reference images of sand + grey vehicles, I'd love to see them.

Lehman Russ Panzer Edition

Despite a weekend of paperwork for the company, I managed to complete one of the paint tests I started. Normally I don't paint a full model for a test, but this one forced me to complete it. I just wasn't sure if it was too boring before I added the weathering. In fact, most of the time was spent figuring out how to weather it, and deciding if I wanted to use green or grey cammo. I've decided to paint up another LR go to with the green turret showed in the earlier post. I don't think it will look too weird seeing a variety of tank color schemes spread across vehicles so long as they all look like they belong on the field together. The final tank may be predominantly grey with sand colored cammo. My Krieg will be painted with the grays and greens used on the tanks

One thing I am not sure of is the tracks. I painted the pins metal, the overall track brown, and the rubber pad black. Should I add metallic weathering powders to the edges of the brown treads? Should I mix in a few more colors of sand and dust?

LR Turret Painted Panzer-Style

*EDIT added some powders to see how the turret would look.

I've been playing around with painting GW tanks in the style of german vehicles for a while, so this morning before my spouse enforced jog, I grabbed an old IG tank and spare turret and painted up the two paint tests you see here. One of the problems I am having with cammo, is that it is designed to break up the outline of the tank. With model painting, that is the last thing I want. The goal is to highlight all of the detail. The green and yellow sand colored turret was my experiment trying o minimized the effect of the cammo so the tank stayed interesting. I imagine brown weathering powder would look good around the hatch. I'm not sold on the scheme, but I do like the yellow sand base color which I played with on the chassis and vanquisher turret. I made a conscious choice to not paint chip the second test, just to see what it would look like prior to weathering. I haven't had the opportunity to use sand colored weathering powders yet, so the tracks on this guy will be interesting. Paint chipping will eventually be applied with a black/brown color along with desert yellow streaking grime. It is al title monotone, but I think it looks better than the green and yellow turret.

Two Paint Tests

My Imperil Guard vehicles are in for a repaint, along with assignment to my DKoK army. So with that I present two paint tests. The LR grey scheme is from FW, though updated to work with the new paint range. The second yellow and green scheme is vaguely WW2. I tried a combination of paint chipping techniques on these two models, actual chipping, sponge weathering, and brush painted. I have become a fan of the brush plus sponge method.

Ruined Statue of Liberty Terrain

I've wanted to reproduce the iconic image of the Statue of Liberty ruins from Planet of the Apes for some time. It turns out that finding statue of liberty torches and heads is pretty difficult. I had this image of taking a statue and then adding all of the rivets and panel lines that can be seen close up. I thought that extra detailing would look really cool. Unfortunately I could not find anything but a statue of liberty mask that was the right size. So after copious layers of resin I had what you see here. I'm not happy with the contraction, but my faith in weathering powders was reaffirmed. A dash of secret weapon green earth and sewage did the trick. This won't go on my display board, but I think it will be pretty fun on a gaming table.