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Hey all, in preparation for getting my models (which should be arriving any day now), I thought I would enlist your help in choosing a fairly historically accurate (I don't need to go into really really accurate stuff, but I do want to be in the ballpark) paint scheme for my LW Heer Panzergrenadierkompanie.

I want to do a end-of-winter kind of scheme, were the snow is starting to melt and there's only slight patches left. My basing I have mostly figured out (I bought some Woodland Scenics Burnt Grass flock, I have a bunch of really fine as well as very coarse sand, and I'll do a bit of snow flock. For some variety I have some low foliage and I may also throw in some Autumn Lichen on there. For even more variety I have Water Effects and my horse's mane hair looks exactly like the long grass you can find for sale).

For uniforms, I found a variety of useful images, but it's probably coming down to a choice of what looks good. I'm also unsure of something - should I try and keep them mostly uniform in appearance, which might look better, or have them be a little more rag-tag with lots of different uniforms, which would be more accurate? Here are some Heer uniforms from LW:
Headgear:

Tunics/Jackets:

Trousers:


So what particular combo of these would look good? Should I do that army-wide or do a variety? Also, what would go well with the vehicles? Which brings me to the question of how I should paint those:


What do you think? Sorry for the wall of text by the way.

I think the rag-tag look is really a strong indicator of Late War Germans. A strong uniform look to me feels much more EW.

Agreed, a variety of uniforms would both be more accurate and more interesting to look at (although also more work to paint). Even for two soldiers wearing the same uniform, the colours could differ slightly to reflect dirt, washing, bleaching in sun etc.

I am not an expert, but camo uniforms were very rare and usually only issued to elite troops including Waffen SS, given the problems with supplies in general. So the vast majority of soldiers would have the green/grey uniforms in different stages of wear. You should also decide on the theater. Uniforms in Italy, West front and East front look very different.

You don't need complicated winter camouflage, most of the time they just put whitewash over the tank. You could do a dark grey undercoat and then put thinned white paint over the top, if it looks a bit streaky it just adds the the 'field workshop' look. They definitely shouldn't be a stark white.

Vehicles can look very scrappy into the late war. The fancy zig zag patterns look nice as does paint applied with a spraygun. But vehicles painted while in the field were very messy things. They were painted with the colours the crews could get, or mix up, and applied with any brush or rag on a stick they could find. The resulting camo scheme was whatever the people doing it at the time decided, and there is a lot of variety if you look at older photos.

You probably don't want to copy something too unique looking if you want to do several vehicles. The one marked "PzRgt 24, Aachen, November 1944" is probably the most generic one and feels more typical than the others.