German Tank Crew Highlights

German Tank Crew Highlights - a Vallejo acrylic paint, the Panzer Aces line

This is one bottle of acrylic paint of the Panzer Aces line, which Vallejo put together specifically for painting the crews of armored vehicles. The word Highlights in the name settles the function of the shade: it is not the base tone of a uniform but its lighter counterpart. It is laid on only once the base has dried, in the places where light falls on a figure: the edges of a collar, the shoulders, the tops of folds of cloth and the front surfaces of the sleeves. The shade therefore makes sense as a pair with the base tone of the same group, not as an all-round color on its own.

Use and properties

• A water-thinnable acrylic dispersion; wash the brushes and the cup of an airbrush with water right after the work, because dried acrylic is markedly harder to get off.
• Paints of this type are thicker and are counted on for a brush, so for an airbrush they have to be thinned with a thinner for acrylics, because water alone weakens the binder and the coat then crumbles.
• The dropper bottle makes it possible to dose the paint drop by drop onto a palette and to mix the transition between base and highlight exactly.
• Shake the paint thoroughly before the work and during it, because the pigment settles to the bottom and unshaken paint covers unevenly.
• Lay the highlight on in thin coats dried one after another; a single thick coat makes a sharp patch instead of a smooth transition.
• Cover the figure with a primer first, because acrylic holds badly on bare smooth plastic.

Who the paint is for

For modelers who build figures of crews for their vehicles as well and want to give uniforms depth without having to mix the lightening tone themselves. For the build of a purely technical model without figures the shade is needless, because it gains its logic only as a pair with the base color of a uniform.

The paint is water-thinnable, but even so work in a ventilated room, do not eat while working and keep it out of the reach of children. The volume of the package is given on the label; if you need to match the paint to a particular color chart, compare it against the maker's chart.