G’Day Mates
Did the German Half Tracks every have just a Dark Yellow paint scheme with out camo ???
And with the Winter Camo (Flat White) was this sprayed on or mopped on by the crew ???
G’Day from Down Under
Where Kangaroo’s hop down Sydney Streets
[:)]
I reckon any of the above is just fine!
I’m no halftrack expert, but German armor in general came in every color and camo you can imagine, applied any way they could get paint from can to machine.
From what I understand (and maybe I’m wrong), it wasn’t uncommon for camo jobs done on German armored vehicles to be done in the field (especially towards the end of the war). Some factories would just put on a base coat of paint and ship them off. German paint that was issued to the field was designed to be mixed/thinned with basically any liquid - from water to diesel fuel - one reason that there is such a variation of color on german armor. Painting your halftrack just dark yellow is perfectly fine - I’m sure there were many just like that where the factory delivered it that color, and the crew didn’t get around to camo-ing it up, or didn’t feel that it needed camoflauge.
I also want to add that the painting done by crewmen in the field was usually done very quickly and therefore usually looks very sloppy. The whitewash you were talking about is usually done with handbrushes by the crew. If you are thinking about doing this, do it by hand (like the crew would have done) and don’t worry about brushstrokes showing or about getting the whitewash in every crack and place on the vehicle. Look at period photos whitewashed vehicles - sometimes the whitewash isn’t even a solid coat. It’s good to do some drybrushing over the whitewash to show wear also - the whitewash was usually a water-based “wash” and would even wash off in heavy rain.
Speaking of sloppy paint jobs, there is a photo of a newly caputred Tiger I that I have seen in color (wish I had it to attach and show you) that illustrates exactly what I am talking about . It has a 3 color scheme, and the paint job looks like crap! Lots of runs everywhere, etc. - nothing like the pretty lines we like to put on our models. Hope this helps!
Panzer Colors (Squadron Publication) has a photo of a winter camo pattern done with chalk. The guys just scribbled all over the vehicle with white chalk!
Generaly they used anything to get color onto the surface. Rags, brushes, brooms, sprayers, buckets of liquid tossed onto the surface, it varied.
African and Russian campaigns had vehicles that used mud for camo. And it had to be reapplied each time it rained. Interesting wear patterns.
Osprey’s publication Panzer Modeling, Squadron’s Panzer Colors and In Action titles, Kalmbach’s Building Tanks… and numerous other publications all have some very good examples of vehicle color schemes.
Mike