too often i believe that the camo paint jobs that people put on german tanks and equipment is too bright. would adding a bit of white to the base color correct this or it this done with weathering and shading? any thoughts will be helpful.

Hi,
What I do is and I just completed a cammo scheme on a Hetzer , is to paint on your base coat and then your cammo, put your markings on, then once it`s all dry give it a healthy coating of brown and black wash. This will tone everything down to the same level at the same time. I believe the reason for some cammo scheme`s to be too bright is because of the amount of work that went into the paint job, heck I even hesitated at putting a wash on my ambush cammo scheme myself !! :-)

Try mixing a flesh tone with your basic camo colors, this will fade them suitably, also a wash or I guess they call it 'filter' will help bringing the colors together.

Adding Flesh-tone? Interesting - I tend to use a dove grey (light grey) as my additive. It "fades" the color and also doesn't seem to change the color much. I would guess that flesh-tone might change the tint... for example, adding a flesh tone to blue turns it "greenish" (not that I use much blue on my armor, right?)... or flesh and "white" makes for a "beige" color... whereas grey just lightens or darkens the color. After all, grey is just a blend of white and black (dark and light).

Whatever works, right?

Keith

I think using grey, flesh, or even a light tan is better than just adding white. White makes the colours look a little funny if you ask me. A reddish brown, for example, can end up looking kinda pink.

Nic

One thing I have read about (and even tried to good effect) was to make the model appear faded by overspraying it with very thin white paint. You do this after the decals have been applied to fade them too. The tank I used it on didn't have a camouflage scheme, but this techinque might work really well for camo, since you are fading everything all at once. Of course, you have to be careful not to spray the white on too thick.

Nic

Once I finished my camo paints, I would apply a very light buff then do washes, a healthy wash as SAS had mentioned can definitely tone down the brightness of the color. And as SAS, sometimes I am actually relucant to apply the wash too much, as the camo can be toned down too much, especially come to ambush schemes.

Usually a light coat of buff is already good enough for me. HTH