I'm working on Dragon's Panzer IV J Last Production and had a question on the camo scheme. I plan on doing an ambush scheme, but would this be a hard-edge scheme with soft-edged dots, or would it all be soft-edge? I know the Germans switched to all hard edge towards the end of the war, but would this scheme be an exception?

I use to think the tank was painted at the factory and that was it except for touch ups but if you stop and think about it, there was winter camo then the spring repaint. When their were major repairs the tank was sometimes repainted. I know one Tiger 1 that had at least three different paint jobs. That said, the J was the last variant and could have had the hard edge paint scheme. I believe that in'45 the paint scheme was mostly red brown and olive green with some dunkelgeld. I have seen the spots as hard edge and soft edge.

Jon, this would have definitely been a hard edge scheme, including the dots, which would be represented as little triangles.

Not necessarily. Here is an example of a late ausf. J (note the hull screens) painted in a soft-edged "ambush" (German: Licht und Schatten - "light and shadow")scheme - note that both the base camo colors and the dots are soft-edged:



The ambush scheme was short-lived - it was only applied to German vehicles from August through sometime in November 1944. Orders were issued in November 1944 to paint all tanks in a factory-applied hard-edged camo scheme. Thus, nearly all vehicles produced in 1945 had the hard-edged scheme. However, if you are portraying a vehicle produced in the fall-winter of 1944 you could portray it correctly with a soft-edged scheme, either ambush or otherwise.

Wow!What luck! That picture is of the tank the Dragon decal option I was choosing! Thanks!

Thank you all for the information. It was very helpful!

You're welcome - and I'll take credit for being psychic!

Well, if it's a last production kit, with three instead of four return rollers, it locks you into the final two months of the war (that photo from Fall, 1944, would be of a tank with the late pattern cupola swivel-hatch, but a four-roller hull). I wish Dragon would offer that combination, so we could do a Battle of the Bulge tank without having to kitbash two different (and expensive) Ausf J kits to do it.

In any case, these tanks were built at Nibelungenwerke, the same plant that built Jagdtigers and Panzer IV 70 (A) tank destroyers, so the tank would have had a similar pattern, given that it went through the same paint shop. In 1945, it was hard edged patterns.