Painting - Base Coat and the AI Colour Guide
Small update, but a big job knocked over for which opportunity was rare this Easter Long Weekend… The turret and hull have recieved a base coat of Tamiya XF-60 Dark Yellow. I am liking the slightly different tone of this colour over the Red Oxide primer compared to my previous mid-war German tank models, which were generally a rattle-can TS-3 Dark Yellow directly over plastic.
As this is a three-tone camouflage scheme I’ve not bothered with any preshading, since I’m expecting any of the subtle variation in base colour to be eaten by subsequent layers. We can always modulate the follow-up layers later if we feel so inclined
Our Paint Mule’s colour scheme is quite unusual for a early-war Panzer II, as with Panzer II being obsolete and out of production by the time German tanks standardised around the Dunkelgelb / Dark Yellow. It’s therefore unlikely that any Panzer II’s still running around in our reference period would’ve bothered to incorporate the contemporary camouflage scheme either.
To try and make our lives a little easier in the follow-up stage, we’ve asked ChatGPT to develop a colour guide for us. While the hull details are imperfect in the AI rendition, it still gives us an appropriate size and shape of pattern to follow.
A little caution and planning is still required, as ChatGPT appears to have created the pattern for each face independently and doesn’t fully account for colours continuing as they meet on a corner
Next steps will be to put this pattern into practise!