World War II Project - P107 (f)/U304 (f) 21st Pz Div Halftracks - Painting Con'ts

Painting really can't be described as anything but a process. Adding in oils and pigments really does lengthen the time it takes to complete the paint work. Its becoming increasingly clear that if I stay the course on this style of painting that I really need to be working on multiple models at once. Unlike acrylics which tend to dry in a matter of minutes (sometimes seconds) here, the oils I'm using take hours and I usually let them sit for at least 24 hours before continuing on to the next step. I'm a bit of an impatient painter to begin with so the waiting can be quite trying at times but patience is really the key to making these techniques work. On several occasions I have finished something like streaking and moved to fast to the next step and wiped out all the streaking effects that I have done.

You can substitute acrylics for oils for all of this, put its decidedly more difficult to pull off. With the oils I have minutes and even hours to work with the paint to get it right, with acrylics I better get it right the first time. I see that Ammo by Mig does make an acrylic thinner maybe I'll try experimenting with that.

In the meantime, I have finished the fading on the U304 (f)s. I used the Abteilung oil paints on two of them and Oilbrushers on the third. I like the Abteilung oils the only disadvantage I see is using tubes which always wastes paint. The Oilbrushers are just a bit easier to deal with in this regard since I can go straight from the bottle to the surface with the build in brush. Once the fading was finished though you can't tell the difference so which one you decide to use really comes down to personal choice. 

Fading in progress:

This is how it starts out, just a few streaks of paint.

Starting the blending, the key to be successful here is very little thinner on the brush.

Kind of messy yet, but I'll get it cleaned up.

A few days after I did the initial work I was able to, more or less, finish off this portion of the paint work. I did a fade on the mostly upper surfaces and I darkened the green in some other areas. What I really discovered is that, at least for me, that its best to keep you oil paint dabs very small and you don't need to use any thinner at all, or very, very small quantities. It didn't take much thinner to wipe away my work. Which means I might consider sealing these again after I do the chipping.