Thursday, April 14, 2011

Schwere PanzerJagerKompanie Part VII - Detailing...again?

In case you missed some:
Schwere PanzerJagerKompanie Part I - Intro
Schwere PanzerJagerKompanie Part II - Preperation
Schwere PanzerJagerKompanie Part III - Airbrushing
Schwere PanzerJagerKompanie Part IV - Detailing
Schwere PanzerJagerKompanie Part V - Wash & Highlight
Schwere PanzerJagerKompanie Part VI - Decal Tutorial

Yes, detailing again.  But this time I do all the detailing on the guns and vehicles.  Tow cables, tools, tracks and what ever other small details needs to be painted.

One of the more tedious jobs of this hobby is painting the road wheels on tanks.  I never used to do this because weathering just covered them up. But, several people on the forum suggested that a paint the road wheels.  So now I do.  Even though its a pain, they do look better painted.

One of the best parts of this hobby is research.  On the side of the 10.5cm guns are these red and white 'sticks'.  I always thought it was so stupid that these nicely camouflaged guns had these bright red and white sticks on it.  I had no idea what these were.  Even though I knew how to paint them, I like to know what I'm painting.  I thought I knew a lot about WWII before I started this hobby.  My knowledge has astronomically increased just from all the research of done.

So, I did some research as to what these were.  It was really hard to find anything on Google, because I had no idea what they were called.  You can't exactly Google "red and white stick thingies."  I even looked in an artillery book.  There was no mention of them in there.  I asked on the forum and finally got an answer.  Apparently the FoW community understands "red and white stick thingies".  These 'sticks' are sighting rods.  Teams would use them to measure the horizon so all guns could range in on the same target.  Like surveying equipment I suppose.



Another bit of research I needed to do was the inside of hatches.  I never used to bother with this kind of stuff, but the better and faster I get the more detailed I want to get.  What I found was that the inside of German tanks were a yellowish ivory color.  But the bottom inside was green grey.  So I painted the inside hatches with a mix of Dark yellow base colour and white.  I did the captured KV like this as well.  Even though I know they repainted their captured tanks German Grey, I have no idea if they would have done the inside too. So, I just assumed they did.  This could be wrong.

Tracks, if you've been following I base coat in a rust brown.  At this point I will do a heavy dry brush of black.  Then a lighter drybrush of gunmetal.

This is how shitty my town is for FoW.  I couldn't find black hobby paint if my life deepened on it.  I tried the tamiya black I use in my airbrush, but it was way to light.  I would have had to do 20 coats.  No one here has the FoW paints.  I had bought the last Vallejo in the city, and of course it was totally dried out.  Man, this city sucks.   

Anyway, the other thing I do at this point is paint windows.  This always seems to be a crap shoot.  I've tried many different things.  Some times they look good sometimes they don't.  But I may have found something I like.  I applied 2 really watered down shades of gray over top of each other.  and they a realy watered down sky blue just on the top part of the window.  I think it turned out pretty well.  Almost looks like you can see the horizon in the window.

Anyway...next will be weathering, which will include basing the gun teams.



2 comments:

  1. Good to see you painting and not focusing on rules!!

    I really like the reflection in the windows / windscreen / windshield.

    ReplyDelete
  2. lol thanx,

    I did get a little carried away with that aircraft stuff.

    I hope to have everything completed tonight.

    Then I can get back to my soviets.

    ReplyDelete