If I want to simulate paint chipping in german vehicles what color should be underneath the primary coat. In other words what paint should I use to simulate this? BTW what enamel paint comes closeset to red oxide primer? Any help appreciated.

As I understand it, most German tanks were primered with Red Oxide paint, so you could
go with that, but I've also heard that as the war progressed, some paint stocks were depleted and they had to use whatever was available. Wish I could be more help

As I understand it, most German tanks were primered with Red Oxide paint, so you could
go with that, but I've also heard that as the war progressed, some paint stocks were depleted and they had to use whatever was available. Wish I could be more help

Ah ! The eternal question ! What's underneath ?????

But is it really important ? We do a lot of chipping and bruising in our modeling, but I have not seen too much of that in real WWII pics. When I see any real tanks, I mostly find bare metal (aka rust) where the paint is damaged.

I think that Swampfox' suggestion comes close to the gruel reality of WWII, though.

I recently attempted to create Red Oxide primer for a King Tiger using Model Master paints. I wanted to use the colour as part of the camouflage scheme as well (that is what this particular King Tiger was like) so I created my "primer" in two stages. First, a mixed Italian Dark Brown (just a dark red brown I had lying around) with Rust, using mostly the darker colour, and sprayed that on. For the second stage, I added Flat White and Flat Yellow to Rust (the yellow prevents it from looking too pink) and sprayed that lightly on the model, leaving certain spots dark. That second colour I mixed looked pretty pink, but after spraying it on top of the darker colour it looks much better. Clearly, I made this job as complicated as possible (I was mainly just having fun with it), but it looks really cool. I put the picture of it in my photo album for you: King Tiger.
Hope you find that somewhat useful.

Nic

I have also recently made my first attempt at chipped paint. First I tried Gunmetal and then Steel, but neither looked right. Next I tried Burnt Umber, which was much better and is perhaps what you should use. I painted the Burnt Umber over top of the chips I had painted steel. The two colours mixed somewhat and that looked really good. You might be able to see this in the pictures of the Topolino in my album.

Nic

Nic nice work, when I looked at the thumbnail foto of the King Tiger, I thought it was in a swimming pool. Till I enlarged the foto, then I could tell it was a glass patio table.