Now this paint job was real pain. Frankly it was my mistake, as I haven’t tested the colour to be applied, which could have saved me a lot of disappointment.
Looking for a recipe for the right green colour, I found two build articles of allied vehicles that used Tamiya’s Olive Drab progressively lightened with Tamiya Sky.
Based on this mix, I started airbrushing the base coat. I wanted to apply colour modulation and was thus looking for high contrast between the darker and lighter portions of the model. However I found out that adding too much Sky into the Olive Drab will result in quite unnaturally looking green colour – very cold shade of green, resulting from too much grey in the colour. Without adding the Sky, the Olive Drab was simply too dark. To maintain the colour balance I kept adding other green paint into the mix to keep the right green tone, but this haven’t fixed the problem fully. I was then trying to adjust the colour by using heavier brown filter, but it didn’t work as well .
At the end I had to repaint the model twice, after which I just called it good enough. I have based the colour on the Olive Drab and Sky, but added Yellow green to the highlights. At the end I have airbrushed thin filter of Sky and Yellow Green mix to lighten the colour. The contrast is not as high as I wanted to have, so I might still play with it.
Categories: My models
MiniArmour 
Painting American AFVs is always a challenge because they are so monotone. There is another factor to consider I think. The colors will change pretty much according to how much sun its getting and our AFVs were all over the world back then. Your Pershing looks good… and after all, the point of this hobby is having fun with what your doing 🙂
Keep up the good work
Jack
Hi, thanks! I am glad you like it. I was bit disappointed with the final look of it. I think I have made the mistake of going too dark with base coat, so overall the model looks bit too dark compared to what I am normally aiming to achieve.
And I fully agree with you on the topic of colour – i think a lot of the heated arguments about the exact shade of olive drab or German dark yellow are moot, the actual colour would depend on number of factors as you have mentioned. Cheers, Vlad