If you follow my blog, you see that I bounce around a lot with my painting projects. For a long time, I would move from one small project to another. In the last few years, I have decided to take on large projects and squeeze in small projects in between to keep me motivated. My current big project is to get through my mass of US equipment for Flames of War.
I bought most of this to represent Lend Lease equipment for my various British and Soviet forces. Over time, I added more for Free French. I got more and decided I would do some Canadians and then I remembered I bought stuff for KG Skorzeny. Well, the amount of unpainted vehicles has gotten too large to ignore!
So, I decided it was time to take this on as a project. So, I pulled all my US based equipment out of my various boxes, bought a few things to fill out units and got everything together. It is quite an impressive (some would say insane) number of vehicles.
I decided I would do the initial work all at once and then finish various portions detail work at a unit group bases. The plan was to spray everyone using Krylon Olive Drab. I then hit all the tank lower hulls with Vallejo mud (different colors for Soviets and Western front forces). I did this to speed up painting the vehicles, as individually painting treads and road wheels is just unrealistic for the number of tanks I want to do (unrealistic for me) in a reasonable time. This is the first separation, for the color change. I stopped working on the Soviets at this point and moved on to the West Front equipment (I will pick back up with the Soviets once the others are further along).
The next step is to hit all the vehicles with a black wash overall. The next step was to heavy drybrush all the lower hull mud areas with Vallejo dark brown and all the upper hulls with Vallejo Brown Violet. I then painted gloss coat on areas that I planned to add decals. That lead to the next separation, as it was time for decals.
I decided to concentrate on the Canadians, as I had all the decals for those forces and could get into a rhythm. I stated with the transports and worked forward by unit. Once the decals had dried, I painted the brown handles on all the wood tools (technically, there would be sprayed green, but the natural look adds a little to the look of the vehicles). I then drybrushed all the vehicles Vallejo Iraqi Tan.
Some of the vehicles had molded bases, so I painted those up to match my infantry and added to appropriate flock. I finished up with some Tamiya Dull coat and the first batch (of many) are done! So, all my Kangaroos and Wallaby vehicles are finished.
- Manteuffel