Painting - Hull Camouflage Complete, Correcting Diffusion and the Blessings of St. Fengda
To the casual observier, there probably isn’t too much progress against my last update as we were mostly doing touch-ups. With a new airbrush needle installed, we were getting much more control over what was coming out of the nozzle. It appears Saint Fengda, the Patron Saint of Cheap Chinese Airbrushes, was looking out for us…
Some areas needed touching up with the underlying Dark Yellow, which need to be touched up again in turn by the Green or Red-Brown. This is because the Green and Red-Brown were always applied over the Dark Yellow base, so in a soft-edged pattern like this you would never see the yellow diffusing over the other colours.
Ensuring the correct diffusion order certainly creates more work than what you’d expect from a hard-masked scheme, and there’s the persistent risk that a spatter or spiderwebbing will send you an another touchup cycle.
On a historical note, it is highly unlikely that a Panzer II F would have ever carried this colour scheme. By the time this camouflague was made official, Panzer II Ausf F was well and truly obsolete and any working examples would have been relegated to training roles or policing occupied territories. They would have most likely retained their original grey scheme, as the majority of Ausf F’s went to the Eastern Front. A smaller proportion of Ausf F’s were send to North Africa to replace losses of B and C variants, and a few examples were captured by Western Allies with the grey scheme painted over with the more appropriate DAK Yellow-Brown
Once we’ve painted the tools, gun, spare tracks and other fixtures we’ll be caught up to the Panther G and our weathering experiment can begin…