Draco - Task Force Bravo

When I first tried painting my Chieftains, I used the painting guide in the British source book exactly, but quickly found something out – the recommended base colour for the brits, Bronze Green (Vallejo 897) is waaaay to dark to be similar to the presented models, or even close to the historical colours. So I tried several other colours to see what would work:

So the Bronze Green was too dark, and the closer colour to what is shown in the book is actually Russian Uniform, which is recommended as the highlight? My original choice was Camo Olive Green, but I realised that I would use a similar colour when I did up my Poles, and I wanted these vehicles to be different.

Whilst I was doing all this, I started painting up my crewmen too – my practice is to have a crewman in the cupola of unit leaders, and a different model in the cupola for the formation commander – luckily, the Brits have both helmets and berets for their crew, so the helmets went in the for the unit commanders, and the formation commander had a beret.

In this case, however, I painted the crewman helmets with an old tube of Brown Violet (Vallejo 887, now known as US Olive Drab). It occurred to me that it was a fairly decent colour, and after a bit of searching, I found I could get a spraycan of it (although I had to order it from Christchurch!). so the tanks went into the Dettol, and the colour scheme for my army was born

German Grey was used for the camo stripes, and then it was a case of Black wash, re-base coat and careful hilights of everything. To be honest, I’m quite happy with the result.

So that’s my first tank formation for my force – C Squadron, 1st Royal Tank Regiment. The Scottish flags are because part of their recruitment area is in Scotland, so it gives me an excuse to use them – and it looks pretty good in my opinion.

Right! Now where do I find some FV432s…