The 13th Hour: Flames of War; painting tanks

Most of Ordo-Ineptus has gotten heavilly into the WWII miniatures game Flames of War in the past few months, and I (albeit somewhat grudgingly at first) followed suit. The scale is much smaller (1:100) than that of Warhammer, which has it's pluses and minuses. On the good side, you don't need to spend as much money and the painting goes by much quicker (for vehicles in particular) On the downside, painting those little bastards on foot is a real eye-strainer. I resigned myself to the fact I wasn't going to be doing my usual detail and was just going to make them 'table nice' which means when you're looking at them from a couple feet away, they look great. The one thing we've found is that washes make a huge differerence and it's a very easy step to make the infantry look that much better. I've also learned that doing any conversion work which is my mainstay with Warhammer models is frustrating work at this scale as well. I converted a german officer into the Red Skull (Nazi arch-villain of Captain America), and that in itself was a bear. I decided I wasn't going to be doing many conversions for this game.

The last few days I've spent painting up the majority of my stuff. I took a while to decide on the camo scheme for my German tanks.

For my infantry I had gone with the basic gray German uniform. I was doing a very cliche WWII German army, and so I wanted them to look like how the Nazi soldiers are always depicted in movies and comics. I have this thing with evil, so I wanted them to be very stark and imposing. I was originally going to do all the tanks in a plain panzer gray, but after seeing pictures of other painted miniatures and the ones that people in the club were working on, I couldn't bring myself to do something so plain and simple. So I wanted to something more interesting and somewhat elaborate, but still keep with my theme of very stark, depressing colors.

I first tried an ambush pattern which was used by the Germans in the late war years for two of my StuGs, but I was unhappy with the results. They looked okay, table-wise, but they really didn't fit with the gray soldiers. Too many lighter yellows, browns and greens. Bob showed me a pic from the Flames of War website of a panzer painted in dark gray tones with an olive green camo in a thin curving vine-like pattern (I'm sure there's a name for it, but I don't know what it might be)

At the same time, I was also painting up my shermans. My friend Rod had posted step-by-step how he had done his own Shermans for his British army, and I really liked the effect of the Gryphonne Sepia wash over the camo paint job followed by Denaab Stone drybrushing and a Devlan Mud wash. (these are all Games-Workshop paint colors, btw)

So now with a fairly good plan in my mind I went to work on the tanks.

After spraying a black primer/basecoat on all my tanks, I picked up my airbrush, which I'm still in the process of getting the hang of, and sprayed the shermans with a green color that was a mix of Catachan Green and Dark Angels Green. For the German tanks (which consisted of five Panzer IVs, two Brumbars, and a Ferdinand) I sprayed a gray basecoat which was a mix of Chaos Black and Skull White with a little Panzer Gray (from ModelMaster).

For the camo pattern on the shermans, I used a mix of Bestial Brown and Calthan Brown. I had picked up some of the very nice Point of Contact pre-painted plastic sherman tanks, and so for these three I wanted to go with a camo pattern that was very similar.

With the German tanks, I did a drybrush first, to get the basic coloring of the tank how I wanted it. I don't have Denaab Stone so I used a mix of Bleached Bone, Skull White, and Chaos Black for my drybrushing for all the tanks.