|
|
|
|
|
|
Studio Ausbildings Company: Part Two
|
Studio Ausbildings Company: Part Two
The Company HQ & Tiger I E Platoon
with Victor Pesch, Chris Townley & Wayne Turner
In part two of this series of articles looking at Battlefront Studio's Ausbilding Company, we present the Company HQ and the first Schwere Panzer Ausbilding Platoon.
Read Studio Ausbildings Company: Part One here...
|
Victor's Tiger I E
Each time I paint something I aim to learn a new technique to add to the repertoire. With this tank I wanted to use it as an opportunity to try some new weathering techniques, mainly rust streaking. Because of this, I decided to go with the early Tiger I E due to the lack of Zimmerit. This provided me with more flat surfaces to try the technique on. I also decided to go sans camo to really make the weathering effects stand out.
|
Being an early production Tiger I E, this tank
clearly had to have been pretty lucky to make it this far into the war.
To represent this I applied a lot of chipping, and a few replacement
parts. Two of the road wheels and a turret hatch I did in the German
standard red-oxide primer colour, and the gun barrel I used a dark grey
to simulate the heat resistant primer that was used on gun barrels. To
finish the tank off I added barrel kill rings, a cupola MG, a helmet
slung on the turret side, and an aerial. |
The painting day went really well for me. The
weathering took much longer than I expected so I ran out of time to do
extra stuff like dried mud around the tracks, but apart from that I'm
really happy with the result.
~ Victor.
|
Wayne's Tiger I E
Originally I was going to make a mismatched Tiger I E from parts of an early Tiger and a late Tiger. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get all the parts I needed in time, so instead I went for an updated early Tiger. It still has the older dished wheels and an old turret with the smoke dischargers. However, I was able to find at home a newer cupola to replace the older model, as if it had been damaged in combat and been replaced with the newer design.
|
I also didn’t glue on the track guards, but
painted it as if they had been attached earlier for a length of time and
had been removed recently. To get this effect I painted the area where
the guard had been attached oxide red (Flat Brown) and added a few
scraps and dings with a mix of Black Grey and Gun Metal. I went for a
simple green and yellow paint scheme, with airbrushed green squiggles,
simple to paint and quite effective.
|
The day went quite smoothly and I finished my tank well within time.
~ Wayne.
|
Chris' Tiger I E
When I started looking for some inspiration on how I would paint up my Tiger, I found precious little information other than a couple of scans from books that showed the tanks with a three colour camouflage. This did make it all a little easier for me though as it meant I would not be spending my entire time mucking about with Blu-Tack like the last few painting challenges we have had. To add a degree of difficulty though I did want to try a little weathering using some of the oil weathering products that are now available and more commonly used on larger scale plastic models. I also wanted to try a trick to making the painting a little easier by painting tracks primer red and then masking them off whilst I painted the Dunklegelb - I knew I would manage to find some ways to make the day less straight forward!
|
|
Given that this Tiger is going to be my HQ tank for a Panzer Ausbildungs Abeilung 500 I needed to balance a desire to paint one tank really well, with the realisation that I would also be setting a standard for the rest of the my company that I would be painting at a later date.
|
|
Sitting down to paint the tank was really fun as I am a social painter - I like sitting down with a group of friends and chatting about things to help distract myself from the fact that I do not enjoy painting as much playing. I got all of my airbrushing and masking done quite early (leaving me time to airbrush the "team King Tiger" and help Mike with his Panther). The next step was pin washing the tank and I was really pleased with how that came out. I've been pin washing quite a bit recently and had some mixed results, nothing that could not be easily fixed, but the Tiger came out perfectly (in my opinion). With a little help from Casey I also tried my hand at some extra weathering around the damaged Zimmerit and some of the raised details on the hull and turret.
|
Painting this one tank has definitely spurred me on to get the rest of my Panzer Ausbildungs Abeilung 500 company painted though!
~ Chris. |
|
|
|