1945 WW2 German AFV | panel lighting set

The last year of the war in three pairs

The three-color camouflage combination German vehicles wore at the close of the fighting rested on yellow, green and brown. The listing of this palette breaks it down into three pairs: 1945 Dunkelgelb Base and Flash, 1945 Resedagrün Base and Flash and finally 1945 Rotbraun Base and Flash. The year in the designation is no ornament, because the shades shifted several times during the war according to which binders and pigments happened to be available.

The division into Base and Flash has a practical point. The base tone is applied over the whole area, the lighter version of the same shade only onto the places the light falls on, that is the roof of the turret, the upper armor and the top edges of the fenders. That creates a depth a uniform spray would never give, and without relying on mixing with white, which always pushes a color toward a chalky impression.

For a modeler building equipment of the last months of the war the make-up is exactly right: tracked and wheeled vehicles, self-propelled guns, half-tracks and artillery tractors were given this three-color pattern with an airbrush, a brush and even a broom right at the unit, so the transitions were usually irregular and coarse.

The six bottles come from the water-thinnable acrylic line. The paint dries matte and takes a clear overcoat, if a decal layer and subsequent dirtying are to follow.

It is worth thinking about the order of spraying. The yellow goes on over the whole area first, and only then come the green and brown patches, because that is the sequence in which they arose on the real vehicles too. The lighter versions are added at the very end, otherwise the following coats would cover them again.