Tank camo help

I too am an airplane guy for the most part and I have never airbrushed a tank but when I do camo it is always freehand. Are you looking for a hard or soft edge on the camo?

If you can tell us what type of tank you're doing, it will help us to make a recommendation.

Okay I'm doing a JGSDF Type 90 and I want to do sharp edges. The colors I'm using are intermediate blue and a dark tan.

If you have any silly putty or kneadable eraser you can pretty much manipulate those into any shape you want and they shouldnt harm the paint underneath it either. Once you paint over them you just rub them and squeeze them and the paint basically just goes away. This should give you a nice hard edge, but be careful with the silly putty, if you let it sit for a while it will "relax" and kinda move from where you put it. Hope this helps.

guardsmen22 wrote:

Okay I'm doing a JGSDF Type 90 and I want to do sharp edges. The colors I'm using are intermediate blue and a dark tan.

You may wish to verify the intermediate blue colour. As far as I'm aware, camouflaged Type 90's are typically an indigenous Japanese shade of olive drab and brownish tan. I'm not aware of other variations, but I'm not saying that other variations don't exist.

I know I'm just putting my own little twist on it.  I'm saying its going to be a coastal defence tank, you know to beat off the evil Korean invaders.

No problem then

Looking forward to seeing it.

100LL wrote:

If you have any silly putty or kneadable eraser you can pretty much manipulate those into any shape you want and they shouldnt harm the paint underneath it either. Once you paint over them you just rub them and squeeze them and the paint basically just goes away. This should give you a nice hard edge, but be careful with the silly putty, if you let it sit for a while it will "relax" and kinda move from where you put it. Hope this helps.

This connects to a question of technique that has puzzled me. In the modeling magazines, I always see pictures of a vehicle almost fully constructed -- most or all of the equipment like jacks and shovels and whatnot already in place -- before the painting begins. For 'cloud' styles of hard-edged camouflage, the silly putty or masking liquid technique works just fine, because it can be worked in around equipment and the nooks and crannies of the vehicle's shape. But for camouflage patterns like splinter camouflage, the British Berlin Brigade urban camouflage pattern, the US Army's abortive Dual-Tex camouflage patterns, or newer digital camouflage patterns, getting a straight-line edge is hard to do with either Silly Putty or liquid mask, and doing that while getting a good seal around a mounted shovel or a towing line is even more difficult. What techniques do you use to deal with those masking issues, or do you leave the extra equipment off until the base painting is done, then finish the assembly before doing weathering?

If I'm painting a camouflaged tank, I generally attach all of the tools and stuff after painting.

In regards to the British Berlin Bridage camo, I would use masking tape and figure on spending a lot of time doing the painting.

In regards to the digital camo, I think the best route would be decals.  It would be a challenge but I couldn't see doing this type of camo with masking tape.

-Jesse

usmc1371 wrote:

In regards to the digital camo, I think the best route would be decals.  It would be a challenge but I couldn't see doing this type of camo with masking tape.

What I want to do is something like the 'Digital Thunder' camouflage on this Slovakian MiG-29, but fiddled with for use on armor. I expect that cutting the patterns into wide painter's tape is going to be the rudest part of the whole process, and I'm still fiddling with algorithms to come up with a way to procedurally generate the fractal pattern, so I avoid the pitfalls that come from a non-stochastic pattern generation (i.e., humans make patterns too regular).