Help, I am trying to stencil a german cross on the side of a tank with zimmeritt coating. I am using the Eduard stencils and MM Acryl. I tried it and the paint spread out in the grooves of the zimmeritt. I ended up with a pretty cool black blob. But if you squint just right it looks like a cloud.

Steve,on zimmerit the best thing to use IMO is the decals I've never tried to use those stencils yet How are they?

Hi, Zimmerit is tricky to put anything on. I think your best bet would be to try to hand paint them them instead of either decals or stencils. All those little grooves make things run kind of funny, so hand-painting should give you more control.

I've only done one here a while back and it was the crosses on the front sides of a Panther with the Zimmerit, and they didn't come out too bad. If you have a big black blob, just 'square' it out some and then put in a white cross in the middle. As I remember from books some of these crosses were really nice looking and some looked like they had been put on with a mop too.

Take care, sgirty

I've seen before very nice works of art by airbrushing the cross on the zimmerit. What you should do is make a stencil and create a zimmerit on a surface ... then practice on it. If it doesn't look at first, dont worry mate! If the weathering and washes are strong enough, the errors wont matter and they will make it look pretty real.

I stenciled numbers and crosses on one of my Panthers that had zimmerit.
I think the trick is to "lightly" spray coats of paint, or it will run and blob. I really had a hard time with the numbers until I tried many very light coats which turned out well.

Try to get out templates from your stencilit on masking tape and then use that instead of the stencilit. It should go better...
Ciao

well I know that verlinden products makes some metal sheets
so you can spray them on
but you can cut it out masking tape aswell

I use the metal sheets and the work GREAT
you can also use a spunge to put them on if you dont have an airbrush it looks cool
but make sure that you dont put on 2 much paint @ one time else it runns all over yr model and we dont want that do we!

Thanks for the help. I will give it a try.

I don't have any particular experience with this, but there are things you can do to the airbrush set-up to make the paint virtually dry in mid air so that it won't run at all once it hits the model. Turn up the psi, spray from farther away, go in light coats. If you're using acrylic, try thining with alchohol rather than water. If you do all these things, the paint will already be tacky by the time it hits the model, and you shouldn't get any run at all.

Hey, I used a piece of clay rolled flat, cut it out using my stencil, pressed it onto the model, sprayed it, and it worked. Thanks for all the help.

For the future, try hand painting them. Most were hand painted in real life anyway!~Chip

I hand painted the white on it. I think it turned out ok.