75th Anniversary of Battle of Monte Cassino and Northern Italy (Army Build)

In my PSC box, I had ordered a Stuka. This is a simple project and as the planes don’t spend a lot of time on the table in FoW, I can spend less time on the painting. It’s a Zvezda kit and went together very easily and very quickly – it took perhaps 5 minutes to clip out, clean up and glue together!

I’ve found a nice camo pattern I want to try to copy. The underside of the plane is a very light blue. Closest from my collection is an Arctic Blue, so I’ve gone with that.

The nose area and tail fin are painted a yellow. I hate yellow, it never looks right for me so I will try the ‘build up from brown’ approach. This sort of worked. It’s better than my previous attempts but I’m still not happy with it. It still took about 10 layers of yellow just to get something resembling an even coat.

The top of the aircraft I’ve painted British Olive Drab. I’m also going to try out some new masking tape I’ve got to really try to get some clean lines on the camo.

Once I was sure the masking tape was applied properly, I’ve gone for German Camo Green, which is quite a darkish green. Seemed to match up well with the picture I had.

As I had thinned the paints down, there was a little bleeding under the masking tape, particularly where the tape crossed some of the detail but nothing too bad. It was fairly easy to clean up and the result looks far better than my freehand.

The set came with some transfers that I duly applied and then gave the model a gloss varnish.

To apply some shading, I’ve given a light dark yellow wash over the yellow areas, a trusty sepia wash on the top and a watered down dark blue for the underside. Once all dry, I’ve applied a matt varnish and it’s good to go. Quick job and table top ready!