Panther Redux

For my first meaty post, I'd like to introduce you to my main current painting project.  Lately my gaming has been focused on playing with Americans, after a long stint of playing Finns and Germans.  Since my Americans are now getting all the gaming love, I have decided to revisit my German tanks.  First up, in honor of Devil's Charge, my panthers!

Here is what they used to look like:

That's from several years ago.  For my first LW army I needed something that would be easy on the wallet and simple to paint. At that time 5 Panthers, 2 Tigers, 3 StuGs, and 2 Armored AA vehicles was 1750 points and just 12 models...perfect!! The army grew, but the paint schemes remained this simple, juvenile scheme.

But for a recent birthday my family gifted me with an airbrush (a Badger 105), and it has been a godsend.  So, for my first real project with the new tool (I've had a little practice base-coating my American tanks) I decided to re-do my Germans.  I started by basecoating the Panthers with Vallejo Air - Dark Yellow:

Then, inspired by the recent Hinterhalt articles on the Flames of War website, I decided to lay on some blue-tac (those pictures didn't come out well, use your imagination to envision strips of blue-tac on the tank).  The turret and the tank were sprayed separately throughout this process by the way...

Then I airbrushed Medium Brown and Tank Green (both Vallejo Air) onto the tanks.  I would let the brown dry first, before adding the green.  Also, the green was added in much less quantity than the brown.

The results were better than I could have hoped for.  There were rare instaces of the blue-tac peeling away a speck of yellow paint, but that was easily fixed with a dry-brush of the Dark Yellow. I then took a piece of wire and began adding the dots, using the same yellow and green airbrush colors.

And using the flash on my iPhone in case you don't like the lighting in that pic:

(spooky)

Anyway, I still have to do the detailing, but I like what I see so far.  For me, it's a huge improvement over my past work, and it's a simple and fun way to achieve good tabletop-quality results.  Once the detailing is done I'll present the whole platoon.  Thanks for reading.