OK gents
I've been busy weathering the Korsun Panther. Every model I do I try something different - don't want to get bored. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. My models always have a "good side" (which gets most of the photos) - that's the side that has fewer mistakes and that often means the side where an experiment worked.
The idea needed to get a Panther D without zimmerit into a 1944 build is to put it into the retreat toward the Dnieper that began after Kursk, and in the case of AG South led to the very armor-heavy battles culminating in the "Korsun pocket" in early 43 (late February-March) which proved a mini-Stalingrad for the Wehrmacht. The Eastern Front was so huge, that battles like that - which would have been huge in the West - are almost lost in the wash. And the fighting in that period is really the kind of thing that led Hitler's divisions to utter ruin - lots of Russian tanks and infantry destroyed, but the Wehrmacht grows ever smaller when the dust cleared and also closer to the German border. After Bagration in June 1944 the Reds shattered the Ost and turned it all into a kind of series of pockets from the Baltic to the Crimea. That's why only about half of the German Army in the East was available for the battle for Berlin - the rest of it was isolated in Courland or even more broken up in Romania, Hungary and ultimately Austria. And then the allies broke out of Normandy and were near the Rhine in November. 1944 was a very bad year for the Wehrmacht. It was also the most violent year of WWII by a huge margin. (I've got a Tamiya SU-76 to dress in Bagration garb for the next build. That offensive not widely known but it was a much greater Soviet victory than Stalingrad or Kursk. Essay time in a couple of months.)
Early 1944 obviously means a winter build. I've done it before but not the way used this time around. I took a page from Mike Rinaldi's book - he's very keen on "layering" and oils. I've looked a few zillion winter-camo pics and there about a zillion effects you could try to emulate. As I understand it, some German winter camo was done with proper white paint - which would leave you with a dirty white tank. (That sure would have been easy - might look neat too.) But I put a three color camo scheme on the tank and wanted to preserve it. I went on the assumption that the crew applied white wash and not paint. German tanks came with a Dunkelgelb base from the factory - the olive and red-brown was applied in the field and were intentionally fragile so they could be quickly changed. I took a common option of assorted thin stripes of olive and brown with the tank mostly Dunkelgelb. In retrospect this was a mistake. Many German tanks had large sections painted one of the secondary colors - usually olive and red brown splotches. Darker colors would have made much better contrast for whitewash than the Dunkelgelb I put on. (It looked pretty good before weathering.) I wasted time on the base coat. I employed "black basing" instead of modulation and it gave a nicely irregular tonal variation - but all was lost once the whitewash went on. Just a simple base would have worked perfectly well. In Rinaldi's book "Tank Art" V. 4, he spent a lot of time on winter camo. He argued, I'm sure correctly, that a German vehicle would have had several applications of whitewash and it would deteriorate in an uneven manner. If you use layering, you don't mess around with whites and make it look as though it had been done more than once. With layering, you give the model two or more paint jobs. So, I gave it a full coat of Com.Art white to start with. Com.Art, if not sealed, is very fragile and can be worn away with any acrylic airbrush thinner. This leaves a worn whitewash effect - you don't get big chips. But over the Dunkelgelb I didn't want big chips - they wouldn't have shown up. (If there had been big olive green patches, I would have used more aggressive chipping.) After the Com.Art was hand brushed away, I got oils. I used them to put on washes, pinwashes and a lot of shadowing. Then I applied hair spray and put Mission Model white over it. MM paints are very nice - but if you don't use their conditioner they're also pretty fragile. (I added a bit of light brown Com.Art to dirty it.) Next step is hand brushing the Mission Model layer off with water. After that I employed what Rinaldi calls "mapping." You use white oils (I used titanium and Wilder white cut with buff - the shades are actually quite different, and there's also still a lot of whitewash there) and brush them on very gently with a long and thin brush. The idea isn't to really paint as much as tap the stuff on. It's a very good technique and it builds up opaque white areas because if you've done the hairspray correctly most of the acrylic white will be gone. Rinaldi is very keen on keeping things irregular and I couldn't agree more (that's why I'm so keen on black basing.) Then I applied another layer of oils - pretty much the same thing, except you might vary the colors a little. I stick to earth tones, but Mig Jimenez likes to throw in some brighter hues like blue or orange to liven things up. Mig is a great modeler (so is Adam Wilder, and a lot of many small steps comes from his very good book "Adam's Armor: Painting and Finishing) but I'm willing to live with the idea that war is the enemy of art and take a crack at making a small plastic object look as much as possible like a big metal object.
After that comes the pigments. I haven't built a base yet so the pigments are only on the tracks and wheels. I like acrylic fixers with pigments - they work great, don't change the color and don't smell. (Figure a watered down acrylic matte varnish. The railroad emporium Scenic Express-a much better place than Wooland Scenics for most things, even if a bit more costly - sells a watered "Matte Medium" that works great and is dirt cheap. (Be a cinch to make your own - if you wanted gloss for some reason, Future would be a fine adhesive.) I made three shades of pigments employing Sennelier and Gamblin products. (Sennelier and Gamblin make some of the world's best oil paints and the pigments they sell to artists is used for the hard core to make their own paints - so it's very good and costs about 25% of something from Mig or AK. Art supply stores should be on every plastic modelers list - we pay a huge premium for the things we buy. A tube of Windsor Newton series 1 oil paint goes for $7.50 and is twice the size of Abteilung. The more I use the Rinaldi method of applying very light coats of unthinned paint the more it becomes obvious that an art brand with a high linseed oil content is actually what you want - so little is used that it dries quickly regardless. The thinner I use is Gamblin Gamsol which is flat out the most benign spirit on the planet - zero smell, zero tide marks. You do use washes for panels - but they're almost like filters. Rinaldi puts straight oil paint on things like bolts - ditto for shading. I didn't overload the pigments below - most winter tanks look to me like they're more clogged with dry mud than wet. I also haven't decided what I want on the base - I may very well decide to set the tank in a kind of a "thaw" and have wet and dry mud interspersed with snow. If so, I'll adjust the pigments and put on some wet mud. Some will go above the hull regardless.
Also, after the base is done the tank is going to get it's last snow storm. I've some goodies from Krycell, a Brit company that makes super artificial snow and a terrific snow wash. (They have neat videos on YouTube - Precision Ice and Snow - check them out if you're thinking of a winter theme. Their stuff isn't cheap, but you don't need to use it on the base - just the tank itself. The crystalline effect is very impressive - I know nothing like it. You poor souls might not either - I know it's really hard to photograph. They make broken ice that's amazing: I've got a 1/350 Dragon Z-28, a vessel that became icebound in the Baltic - that would make a fantastic dio. If the kit was 1/700 I'd do it for this build. We'll see.) I've bought some debris junk (barbed wire etc) that I hope will make a desolate late winter in the Ukraine atmosphere. When things get settled, I'll put on rest of the tools. Then the last dust of pigments. If I'm lucky.
Pics below are adequate - although too light. I'll poach my wife's iPhone when things are done. If you click one and get more resolution the weathering becomes considerably more clear.
Compbld3 by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
CompRear by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
CompBld1 by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
Compbld2 by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr