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Ok, I have a dilemma that I want some help with. I have a good number of IG tanks that are sitting around my modelling table unpainted. I really want to paint them to make my army look more consistent. But, I don't know how to paint them. My infantry are basically standard Cadian but I'm not a huge fan of the standard Cadian tank scheme. It's not exactly camouflage-y enough. I want something that might actually hide a tank in a forest. So I want to get some good opinions from the guys here. Thanks in advance for any help!

Here's a Chimera I painted for my Guard. It's Catachan Green and Calthan Brown, with black stripes between. The Catachan Green was drybrushed with Camo Green, and the Calthan Brown with Tausept Ochre:

I would say just go on google and search tank camouflage and see what pops up that you like. Then take the photo of the camo and tank you chose, and use that as a base for your first tank, than afterwards just keep changing up the patterns a bit to make it look more realistic. As most tanks are not going to have Exactly the same pattern of camouflage.

Good Luck! I gave up trying painting camo on tanks a while ago.

^^ What he said.





The other thing to bear in mind is that all the vehicles in a real world unit are usually painted with exactly the same pattern, that is, the shapes and colours are identically applied.

If you want a camoflauge you've to think about which kind of terrain your army will be working in. Urban, desert, woods, marsches and so forth.


Here's how I painted a pattern more suitable for forrests and perhaps swamps


The idea behind this is open grass-fields with yellow (dry) grass or perhaps sand.

Try to imagine where they are fighting, and you will soon have some ideas

http://webpages.charter.net/w00t/chimera.JPG

Here's my 'Urban' scheme before wash and touch up.

Wow that picture came up way to big, I guess the forum doesnt auto resize?

Brother SRM wrote:Here's a Chimera I painted for my Guard. It's Catachan Green and Calthan Brown, with black stripes between. The Catachan Green was drybrushed with Camo Green, and the Calthan Brown with Tausept Ochre:

Nice!

Ok, so I did some searching around the internet and found a good candidate for my tank camo. A German Panther tank.



So I hope that will fit with my army, considering the infantry are mostly green and the tank is mostly green. My plan is to start off as usual, by spraying the entire tank green and then doing the whole drybrush thing. Then to paint stripes of scorched brown in a pattern across the tank. Once I do that I plan on painting Dheneb Stone over the brown (not completely, I'll leave a little border), and progressively build up to Kommando Khaki. Hopefully it will turn out well, thanks for all your help.

Well, I'm off to go try it out.

That's ambush camo on the German tanks. The base coat is actually the yellow color. That's the color that the tank left the factory with. The war was going badly for the Germans by this time, so tanks were rolled off the assembly line and shipped into the field as fast as possible.

The actual camo was applied by the crew in the field. They applied it with whatever was handy. So sometimes it's sprayed on, other times it was done using rags etc. So no two tanks were exactly alike.

The winter camo you see on German WW2 tanks is mostly a whitewash applied over the top of the tank, especially in the early war. So you'd see patches of grey in spots , etc since the base color was gray early on.

I'm mentioning this only for anyone that is modelling a force that may have been in the field for a long time or one that is having logistical issues.

If you want ideas on painting that camo pattern there's an article on the Flames of War site I believe on how to paint it along with the colors.

I'm planning on redoing all my IG armor and heavy weapons based on this camo pattern as well.

If your troops are serving in a winter wonder land?

Nice samples so far guys!

Ok Bortass, considering that you and I are both painting armor in this scheme maybe we can try and find a good formula for painting it. I checked out the Flames of War site but the problem with that is that i have only GW paints. So maybe we can try and find a good way to paint this together.

Try sponging the white on lightly with a sponge only just holding a tiny bit of paint. A bit like dry brushing. You dab and dab lightly to build up the paint gradually.

bortass wrote:That's ambush camo on the German tanks. The base coat is actually the yellow color. That's the color that the tank left the factory with. The war was going badly for the Germans by this time, so tanks were rolled off the assembly line and shipped into the field as fast as possible.

The actual camo was applied by the crew in the field. They applied it with whatever was handy. So sometimes it's sprayed on, other times it was done using rags etc. So no two tanks were exactly alike.

Sorry but thats not quite incorrect.

German tanks were painted at the factories from 1944 with a camo pattern. It was NOT done in the field by troops as it used up vital petrol (used to thin the paint) supplies and increased the amount of equipment units had to transport. At best in the field a vehicle might receive a touch up job, but even that was often done when the vehicle was moved to a rear area werkstatte kompanie, not by the crews.

The patterns applied at factories were to a set pattern. Though this slightly varied due to human error in application and changes in paint mixes and pigment despite RAL colours being suppossedly set to a fixed pigment.

Each factory had a different pattern allowing you to tell from which factory a tank came from by its camo pattern. This is particuarly distinctive with Panthers.

Camo was applied as either 'soft edge' (sprayed on with no stencil) or 'Hard Edge' (sprayed on with use of stencil).

What you do see late in the war is a number of 'improvised' paint-jobs done by field repair units. These are often on older vehicles or those that have had work carried out on them or ones that needed a new coat of paint.

But generally, most German camo schemes from 1944 on were applied at the factory. Though all crews would improvise camo using local materials, especially mud, when needed and whitewash in winter was often applied by the crews using brooms.

The idea of camouflaging tanks is to give an advantage of about 15 seconds, meaning that if it works, you spot your enemy before he spots you. So, for woodland, you want a basic green/brown (khaki!) base that blends into the overall background; slap on a darker shade near ground level, and black randomly over all corners and straight edges ( there're no straight lines in nature); don't have anything shiny showing, and put a darkish wash over the lot. Add mud/snow etc but note that paint, mud, snow,various fuel & lubricant stains etc etc all turn into a sort of general light grey after a few days.
You might find it easier to just spray everything olive drab, then drape it in netting and add cam to that?

I simply don't camo my tanks. Think about it tanks were made camo during ww2 now in the 41st millennium we still do it?

smeugal fan wrote:I simply don't camo my tanks. Think about it tanks were made camo during ww2 now in the 41st millennium we still do it?

Why not? Following that logic, you could argue that tanks were used in ww2, in the 41st millenium would we still use them? And even if it seems illogical, people usually paint camo on because they like the way it looks.

I have a desert themed army and I've tried several camo schemes. All I would say is be careful: if you use a camo pattern that would be great in real life, it does exactly what it should and breaks up the lines of your tank TOO much, making it difficult to see any detail.

After a few test paintings I ended up with a basic khaki-ish desert scheme for my vehicles, I guess a similar basic scheme would work nicely for woodland tanks.



If you do use camo, I find two contrasting colours look the best to my eye, like how I paint my valks, so the detail doesn't get lost, but obviously this is personal preference.

Big P wrote:

bortass wrote:That's ambush camo on the German tanks. The base coat is actually the yellow color. That's the color that the tank left the factory with. The war was going badly for the Germans by this time, so tanks were rolled off the assembly line and shipped into the field as fast as possible.

The actual camo was applied by the crew in the field. They applied it with whatever was handy. So sometimes it's sprayed on, other times it was done using rags etc. So no two tanks were exactly alike.

Sorry but thats not quite incorrect.

German tanks were painted at the factories from 1944 with a camo pattern. It was NOT done in the field by troops as it used up vital petrol (used to thin the paint) supplies and increased the amount of equipment units had to transport. At best in the field a vehicle might receive a touch up job, but even that was often done when the vehicle was moved to a rear area werkstatte kompanie, not by the crews.

The patterns applied at factories were to a set pattern. Though this slightly varied due to human error in application and changes in paint mixes and pigment despite RAL colours being suppossedly set to a fixed pigment.

Each factory had a different pattern allowing you to tell from which factory a tank came from by its camo pattern. This is particuarly distinctive with Panthers.

Camo was applied as either 'soft edge' (sprayed on with no stencil) or 'Hard Edge' (sprayed on with use of stencil).

What you do see late in the war is a number of 'improvised' paint-jobs done by field repair units. These are often on older vehicles or those that have had work carried out on them or ones that needed a new coat of paint.

But generally, most German camo schemes from 1944 on were applied at the factory. Though all crews would improvise camo using local materials, especially mud, when needed and whitewash in winter was often applied by the crews using brooms.

Interesting. I can't recall where I came across that info on German tank camo being done by the crews.


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Airforce32123 wrote:Ok Bortass, considering that you and I are both painting armor in this scheme maybe we can try and find a good formula for painting it. I checked out the Flames of War site but the problem with that is that i have only GW paints. So maybe we can try and find a good way to paint this together.

The GW colors are bubonic brown for the yellow base, snot green for the green, and dark flesh for the brown. I pulled those colors out of one of the FoW books that lists paint colors to use from multiple ranges.

Bortass,

Till 1943, it was reasonably common for crews and werkstatte units to apply camo patterns at the front. Early tanks even came with a spray gun as part of the standard equipment.

As the war progressed and materials became more valuable such things were stopped and it made better sense for the vehicle to leave the factory already painted.

Its only been in recent years that research has shown this happening, indeed you can now get whole books detailing which factories did which patterns, and for the anal treadhead like me, there is a geeky pleasure in looking at pics and goiing 'that Panther is from the MANN factory'... I liken it to trainspotting in terms of nerd-factor.

Vehicle camouflague is not really designed to allow a vehice to hide as such. Its more for breaking up the outline and making it difficult to track/target accurately.

smeugal fan wrote:I simply don't camo my tanks. Think about it tanks were made camo during ww2 now in the 41st millennium we still do it?

Well, the thing is, no matter what year it is, if there are infantry and tanks fighting relatively conventional warfare (as we know it now), there will be a need to try to move troops around battlefields. If you can do that without being seen, all the better. There is no reason to think that camo wouldn't be used still. Assuming that technology hasn't quite caught up with the times (like the Dark Age of Technology in the 40k universe) and we're still using projectile weapons, why wouldn't we still use camo to hide our battlefield assets?

If you think about it, camo has been around since animal life has needed to hide from its predators. No reason why that wouldn't still be the case 40,000 years from now. Nothing wants to be eaten, right?




Ghidorah

The Mk.1 Eyeball is still the most widely used piece of battlespace intelligence gathering technology.

Except for the Necrons and (probably) the tyranids who have undoubtedly made some upgrades since Mk1 times

bortass wrote:
Automatically Appended Next Post:

Airforce32123 wrote:Ok Bortass, considering that you and I are both painting armor in this scheme maybe we can try and find a good formula for painting it. I checked out the Flames of War site but the problem with that is that i have only GW paints. So maybe we can try and find a good way to paint this together.

The GW colors are bubonic brown for the yellow base, snot green for the green, and dark flesh for the brown. I pulled those colors out of one of the FoW books that lists paint colors to use from multiple ranges.

Ok, so are you suggesting that I spray it bubonic brown, paint snot green stripes, and outline those with dark flesh? Just wanna check before I go off and paint my tank. Or maybe there's a FOW tutorial for painting tanks you could direct me to.

Thanks to everyone who responded.

Big P wrote:Bortass,

Till 1943, it was reasonably common for crews and werkstatte units to apply camo patterns at the front. Early tanks even came with a spray gun as part of the standard equipment.

As the war progressed and materials became more valuable such things were stopped and it made better sense for the vehicle to leave the factory already painted.

Actually, the edged-blob pattern is more akin to the pre-war French camouflage patterns:


From early 1943 through August of 1944, tanks were painted in dark yellow at the factory, and units were issued cans of paint paste -- red brown and olive green -- which were to be mixed with gasoline and sprayed onto vehicles to create a camouflage pattern. The amount of thinning varied from unit to unit, and with fuel shortages, the paste might be thinned with anything from water to used motor oil, and variously applied with spray guns that were issued to the units for applying the camouflage, brushes, mops, brooms, rags, or whatever was to hand. This created a wide variation both in the patterns that were used and the colors of the resultant camouflage.

In August of 1944, OKH (OberKommando des Heers -- Army High Command) ordered that all new vehicles would be painted at the factory in a dark-yellow base, over which a hard-edged pattern in red-brown and olive-green was painted, then a further dot pattern in those three colors painted on top, which was the Hinterhalt-Tarnung pattern, referred to as the 'ambush' pattern. At the end of October 1944, this was ordered to be replaced by the primer red oxide base with an oversprayed pattern in dark yellow, red brown, and olive green (in some combination, applied differently at different factories depending on availability of paint). At the end of November 1944, this was changed again, olive green becoming the base color with dark yellow and red brown overspray, and it changed again in early 1945, returning to the dark yellow base with red-brown and olive-green markings. Adding to the complication of figuring out what color vehicles were actually painted in from references (and even more so with vehicle markings) is the fact that the vast majority of available photographs are in black-and-white, where colors that are visually distinct might appear as the same shade of grey, depending on the lighting.

Winter camouflage was originally a white water-based paint issued to units as a paste that could be washed off at the end of the winter, but because of shortages, whitewash became the standard, with some units with particularly bad supply problems having to resort to white sheets tied across their vehicle, and in at least one case documented in the 'Panzer Colors' books, with chalk scribbled in lines all over the vehicle (a Sturmgeschutz III, if I remember correctly). This was applied with the same variety of methods as the red-brown and olive-green camouflage pastes, often with irregular coverage to further break up the tanks' outlines.

Digital camouflage has its origins in the 1970s with the "Dual-Tex" camouflage system, which took the then-standard US Army four-color camouflage system and broke up the edges between colors into 3" blocks to create a pattern that would look, from a distance, the same as the four-color patterns, while having additional detail that broke up the pattern further at closer ranges. This was not adopted for general use, but the principles behind it continued to be researched, forming the basis for the current range of digital camouflage patterns -- they contain both high-frequency (small dots) and low-frequency (larger blobs) patterns to create a distribution of pattern disruption that remains effective across a wider range of sight distances than the standard 'blob' camouflage patterns.