Hey all. Third tank in, and I’m taking my first stab at whitewash.
I was going to try the hairspray technique, but it seems better suited to heavily worn whitewash, and this particular tank seems to have sported a fresh, factory-applied whitewash, so I wanted to go a bit more uniform.
But I still want to wear it down a little bit before I move on to weathering.
Is it common to drybrush the base color over the whitewash around edges, hatches, etc? I think it could either look really good, or awful, but can’t sort out which in my mind…
What about the notion of wet, white Mig pigments applied over panzer gray base coat, and then removed as needed? I’m thinking about this method for field-applied whitewash, and it seems like a scaled version of the real thing. Am I in for an unpleasant surprise with that?
I’m a big fan of getting a photograph of the real thing. As Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot by just watching.” This photo is from the Allied side (sorry) , but shows FRESH whitewash (in other words, this is as good as it’s ever going to look) and may be useful to you:
Whitewashing an M36 Tank Destroyer at Dudelange, Luxembourg, January 3rd 1945.
Gave the drybrushing a shot last night…and it worked great! Think I may need to dial it back in a few places, but so far so good.
Didn’t feel like dragging out the big Nikon, so here’s a quick iPhone shot. For some reason it really picked up on the dunkelgelb and made it stand out far more than it does in person.
SteveM, the trouble you’ll run into with using the pigment approach is keeping it thin enough and controllable. If you sprayed the pigments on via airbrush, that might work…otherwise it could be tough to keep it all in-scale in terms of the final result.
