During my most recent trip to Hornet Hobbies, Dave – store owner and long-time friend showed me Panther he is working on and I felt inspired by his work so much that I pulled my own almost finished Panther G from the shelf and put it on the workbench. After having built a lot of modern armo, getting back to WWII subject was quite refreshing!

There was very little to be finished in terms of construction, so I was able to quickly prime the model and start the painting phase.

My plan was to recreate vehicle from 1945 as there is plenty of camo patterns to choose from and AK’s book 1945 provides a lot of inspiration in this matter.

I decided to give try a hard edge camouflage with stripes of the usual dark yellow/green/brown. Having put on the base coat, it took me one longer evening of masking and painting and masking and painting, and it was done. Only, the more I looked at it, the more I didn’t like it. The pattern was different from the color plate I was trying to replicate, mostly due to different relative width of the stripes and their angle. After some contemplating about my happiness with the result I decided that no, it’s not good enough and the model received a bath in windex.

Now comes the second try. Unlike my usual process I decided to limit the preshading in terms of coverage. The reason is quite simple, I feel that while preshading is very powerful tool to add depth to the monochromatic finish, when used at a model which will have camouflage consisting of multiple colors, the effect will look strange as the preshading will affect only the first layer of color. unless of course you mask of each single layer, which I don’t think would be worthwhile exercise.

So here the kit is after limited preshading.

See previous part