¹⁄35

Greetings from the Eastern Front

The figures
As the figures, that came with the kit were very proper, I used one crew member with changes of arms and corpse for positioning him on the hull top. Because of the use of other arms, than those of the kit, I had to make new seams along the sleeves. This was done with stretched sprue, welded with plastic glue. Before the glue turns hard, I pushed my crafts knife into the "seam", to simulate its irregularity.

The commander "lost his head" but immediately got a new one from VERLINDEN. As my only spare head, that nearly matched the appearance of Hptm Mueller unfortunately showed an SS-skull on the commanders cap, I had to remove this. As a substitute, I made the Wehrmacht-insignia out of TAMIYA-putty.
The workshop soldiers from Tamiya were taken almost unchanged: The fingers of the standing maintainance man were slightly bent for a better ergonomic appearance. Furthermore the czech-type overalls, taht were in common use among German workshop crews, had to be upgraded with two back pockets each, which were again made by using aluminum foil.

Now switching to the painting of the figures: The flesh areas were done with artist oil colors after grounding them light brown. A drop of glossy varnish onto the eyes gives a realistic shining. As assault gun crews wore grey panzer style uniforms, I featured this as well (a good reference is the book of Schlicht/Angolia, which is mentioned in the appendix). Again I used a mix of washes, filters and drybrushing, as well as airbrushed layers to gain the different shades of sunburned, washed out, worn and "weary" clothing. The leather belts and shoes were primed with black, resp. dark yellow for the officer's belt and drybrushed with burnt sienna or raw umber. (Tip: the mid-war shoes didn't have shoe nails on the sole. So don't paint them!)