Category Archives: WW2

Painting Khaki with Andrea Miniatures Paints

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I’m painting up a bunch of Soviet 1/35 infantry from Tamiya and using a variety of Khaki colors for them. I am using Andrea Miniatures Paints and want to both put in a plug for them and share some info that I hope you find helpful. I had their Khaki paint set already. It comes with two different palettes of three colors each. Three I would call yellowish green and three I would call pale brown. The lightest of the yellow greens is what I wanted to use as a base coat for some of the figures but thought the others all too dark. I was curious about the Afrika Korps paint set which has two different palettes of three colors each. I hoped they would not be duplicates of colors in the Khaki set and they aren’t. And I wanted to share the colors I intend to use so hopefully you can see the differences.

From left to right is the Arika Korps Base B, Light B (these are part of what I’d call the sand triad), the Khaki Light A (lightest of the yellowish green), and Light B (lightest of the brown). The other Afrika Korps triad is an olive green color. I thought the Light B would be perfect for the cape as a base. Here is a slightly closer pic. (Yeah, the more I photograph the more I realize it’s time for a real camera….)

Why Andrea Miniatures? There is a bit of a story here. I think I’ve raved in the past about some of their paints, especially their blue set. I have used the black, white, and red also. All nice sets. Earlier this year, I found out I was using them wrong. I was interested in painting splinter pattern camo on Wehrmacht figures and came across this video from Dave Yonquist of Last Cavalry on how he paints them:

(I am not affiliated with Last Cavalry but had really excellent service when buying Andrea paints from them.). The interesting thing about his technique is how thin he puts the paints on. Amazing, and as he says in the comments he things them right down to a kind of filter consistency using nothing but water. I kind of couldn’t believe it but went and tried it for myself. The paints are amazing. I just kept adding water and they didn’t disintegrate but just got thinner down to a kind of filter consistency. So I’ve been doing a lot of different things with my Andrea paints as a result of learning this. (I tried it on some other popular acrylics without similar results. Many of those are disintegrated already when they come out of the bottle….).

Doing this reminded me of another video I had seen and kind of didn’t believe. Julian Conde did a blog of painting with Andrea paints where he airbrushed them onto a figure. I guffawed and forgot about it. I’ve never been able to airbrush acrylics of any sort and thought the dense pigment in Andrea would make it impossible to use them. So I took my thinned Andrea and poured it into my airbrush and the results were … not good. But I didn’t give up and went back to look at his blog:

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There was obviously something I was missing. A little bit later I came across a post from him on a forum I visit and reached out. He responded very kindly and suggested I add some airbrush thinner and some slow-mo retarder from VMS to my mix for the airbrush. I tried that and after a bit of trial and error I think I have enough of the hang of it to start painting figures with Andrea miniatures acrylics through the airbrush! I did the above 4 that way in one session with no clogged airbrush. This is pretty amazing to me. The mix is roughly 1/4 paint, 1/3 water, 1/3 Vallejo airbrush thinner, 1/12 slow-mo retarder. Now I am just getting the hang of it so I say roughly. I had more or less paint in the various mixes just due to my imprecise measuring and it all came out well if a little different in consistency. That mix is very thin and I had to run about three coats to get a nice opaque finish but they look fantastic.

So shout out to Dave Yonquist and Julian Conde. I’ll be phasing out other acrylics I use as I add to my Andrea paints collection.

The Pool Deepens

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Now a very late war IS-2.  I did not paint it with the Berlin stripes.  This is a very fine model, went together well, and being almost entirely just green was pretty easy to paint.  I’ll probably dust it up a little bit.  It’s by JTFM again.

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Soviet Vehicle Pool

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Added a couple of JTFM Uralmash T-34s to my Soviet vehicle pool.  These are the finest sculpts of 28mm or 1/56 vehicles I know.  But I have a lot of problems getting paint to stick to the resin.   This time I tried Stynylrez primer as I heard such good things about it.  Well, it didn’t really stick at all.  So I rewashed them with alcohol and applied Mr Surfacer well thinned.  It seemed to work ok.  Anyway, I’m pretty pleased with the way they came out.  I have a JTFM IS-2 almost done and I’ll post pics of it here soon.

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I’m eager to get back to playing some Chain of Command games.

 

Ground support

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When I started working on 1/72 planes for the Battle of Britain, I saw the Academy P-47 bubbletop kit and had to have it.  I bought it, built it and the kit was a dream to put together.  But the decals silvered up something awful and it doesn’t look that great as a result.    So I bought another one.  Second copy of the same kit didn’t go together as well as the first, but it was fine, just more sanding and filling, and not much at that really.  But this time I used after market decals from Barracudacals.  This was an awesome set of decals.  They went on like a dream.

Anyway, I still need to add the prop.  It’s done and I was about to stick it on when I realized I still need to do and add the tailwheel and the antenna.  I don’t want the prop on when I’m doing that in case there is any fiddling required.  But here it is:

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More work on the Shoho

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I need to figure out how to take real close-ups.  Maybe my camera just can’t do it….

I’ve added a lot since the last update.  I started adding delicate PE before I realized I needed a degaussing cable.  The ship had one all the way around the hull.  Dan K on the shipmodel forum provided some close-ups and I used those to put one on my model.  I used plastruct .010″ rod to make the cable.  I mostly tried to follow what was in the photo, but realize it’s not exact.  It’s fairly easy to do using styrene.  I’d prefer a kit to have it already molded on but in cases where it isn’t I feel I can do it myself now.

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You can see some fine photo-etched detail already.  I put the pillars on to support the flight deck before starting on the railings everywhere because I thought there might be some fidgeting to make sure everything was correctly placed – and there was.  But it all goes together quite smoothly with excellent fit.

I replaced the shields on the AA mounts with the photoetch in the hyperdetail set.  I’ve put the searchlights on their photoetched searchlight platforms – very delicate.  I used the 25mm mounts that came with the kit.  They seem nice.  I will examine the ships’ boats that go on the rear deck and compare those to some after market versions I have.

The only closeup that turned out makes me realize I need to clean up the corners of the pieces forming the angles in the degaussing cable.  And that one PE door may need to be straightened.  I’m not sure – it might just be the camera angle as I looked over all the doors to make sure they looked straight.  There are plenty of doors in the kit so if I have to remove this one and put a new one on, there won’t be any heartbreak.

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Next up I think will be the railings on the front part of the ship so I can think about getting the front half of the flight deck on.

Progress on Shoho

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I was discouraged by the deck that came with the Shoho and it put me off working on this for awhile, but now I’m back at it.  I should be able to post a couple of pictures of the deck in progress soon.  I’ve sanded the raised parts off the rear of the deck so it will take a decal, and I shaved off the excess wood deck planking at the rear.  I’ve decided to paint the word part and mask that off before I continue working on the deck.  Some progress photos on that soon.

But here is a photo of the hull so far:

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I spent a lot of time getting the seam off between the bottom plate and the hull.  The forward superstructue then gets glued in.  I add a lot of the PE to it before I attached it – the brass deck you see, the brass front to the superstructure showing the windows, and the brass decking on either side of that.  In addition I put the prominent vent (I think that’s what it is) in the center of that brass deck and a bunch of cable reels.  When I attached it to the hull, the fit was tricky in a couple of places.  I had a slight gap along the metal deck.  I managed to fill that with a little dissolved putty.  It worked pretty well to fill that gap.  I was stressed about how I would do any sanding since the metal deck has a nice treaded relief.  I shaved the excess putty with my X-acto blade and it seems to be nice.  Therewere larger gaps on the decking around the side of the hull.  I filled and sanded those and they are invisible now.  I took close-ups but they just came out as a blur.

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There are additional compartments on either side of the hull structure.  Should I call it the superstructure?  The flight deck will go on top….  Anyway there is nothing in the plastic set that these correspond to.  I take it they are taking the opportunity to fix some things with PE.  That large sheet of brass making up the front linoleum deck is a little wider than the original and the shape of the rear linoleum deck (another pic that just came out as a blur) is different and wider than the original plastic deck.

You can also see a couple of the PE doors I’ve attached to the hull.

KV-1

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This is a 1/48 scale model of a KV-1 made by Hobby Boss.  This is the first plastic kit I’ve assembled since I was a teenager probably.  It is a great little kit.  I’d say it’s done,  but I’ve got a couple of things to fix, and I think I may want to do some more weathering.

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When I went to do the final assembly, which is really just putting the turret on it, the turret no longer fit.  Before I started the painting it fit no problem.  I must have squished something somewhere along the line because even after quite a bit of filing it no longer slipped into its hole, and it still doesn’t turn.  I’d like to remeidate that, but right now, I just wanted to get it photographed.

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There are two weathering things I want to do to it now that I’ve got it all together.  First, the treads had a nice bare metal effect on them before and that seems to not be as pronounced so I’ll redo that on the visible treads.  And I’d like there to be more dust on the vertical surfaces, in particular the sides of the turret.  All the dust is from a mixture of pigments and I’m not convinced that will work that great on the vertical surfaces, so I’ll probably work on finding an oil mixture that gets me a good effect.

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The Hobby Boss kit is a charm.  There were a couple of small things I didn’t get right, but they aren’t really visible on the finished model so I’m not too worried about that.  I’m also working on one of their T-34 kits which is more challenging than this kit was.  The main difficulty with this kit was getting the tracks to fit.  On the one hand it’s pretty easy, but those final joins were a pain.  You can see a little inconsistency in that on the front track on this side.

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I’m also not convinced by the rusty exhausts.  I know everyone does that, so I did it, but I might repaint them more black or something.

I highly recommend this kit.  I’ve been thinking about switching to 1/48 because of the greater realism of the vehicles.  I’m not sure how well they will hold up to gaming use though.  I don’t want to be repairing it after each game.  We’ll see.

 

Midway!

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Start of a smallish project.   Well, it could be a fairly large project but my part of it is small.  I’m doing the Japanese Carrier Strike Force for Midway.  Here are the carriers:

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I guess you can read the labels :-).  The models are ghq.  This shot pretty much features the decals from Flight Deck decals: Link to Flight Deck Decals.  They are very nice. I was worried about whether they would be hard to use because of their size, but they went on really smoothly.

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You may be able to see on the Kaga that the red bled into the white and gray of the decal.  I’m not sure exactly why.  I noticed this on one of the other decals as well, but on that one it only bled around the edge of the gray.  I painted over the gray with Foundry Slate Gray C which is pretty close to a perfect match for the gray on these decals.  I had a couple of touch up spots on the wooden flight decks and I used Golden Skin from Reaper for those.  I think I’ll paint some planes and put them on front of Kaga to better hide the bleed.

 

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Now all I have to do is paint a couple of battleshipes, a couple of cruisers, a bunch of destroyers and I’ll be all done!

 

M10s for the Yanks

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I think this is the last of the supports I’m doing for my Americans for Chain of Command.  It’s a pair of M10 tank destroyers from Warlord.

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Apologies for the photos.  I couldn’t find my camera and so snapped these with my phone.  (My phone isn’t bad at taking pics but it’s not quite the same).  The models turned out fairly well compared with what I thought they would be.  There was a lot of patching to the hull on one of the models and some patching on the hull of the other.  You can see if you look closely and it probably shows up on the pictures pretty clearly.

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For my American forces I now have a full US infantry rifle platoon and a weapons platoon.  I painted up enough alternate command figures to use them as an armored rifle platoon from an armored division if we want to have a game like that, but the infantry are marked as US 90th infantry division and that’s how I intend to use them.  I have an FOO to bring in a devastating off-table mortar barrage, a 3″ anti-tank gun, a .50-cal (that could be part of the weapons platoon as they had one mounted on a jeep), 3 Shermans, and these 2 M10s.

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Rubicon T-34/76 completed

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I’ve been working on this slowly since my review post after assembling this and it’s now done.  I think.  I may go over the tracks to make the metal look worn but I’m not sure.  That’s visible in a lot of historical pics but not in all, and I don’t really want to call attention to that part of this model which is its weak link.  (ha)

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I thought about making it a winter camo tank as I really like doing that, but opted for the dusty, summer of ’42 on the steppes (TM) look.

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I added a couple of wood crates as additional stowage but nothing else.  You can see where I did a rather poor job of filling the hole on the back of this model.  It doesn’t show up that much unless you look close, but those kinds of things stare back at you in photos.

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I absolutely love the decal sheet that comes with the model.  And the decals went on like a breeze and I had to do hardly anything about silvering with them.

I’ll have to get a couple more of these.