Painting Challenge entry 8: Converted Beutepanzer

After some mishaps the looted Universal Carrier is finally finished. First looking for suitable readymade rivets, before settling on using putty, delayed it a bit and then right when I thought I was done I noticed I had forgotten decals... Well here it is in all it's glory

But first I'd really like to thank my mysterious benefactor for this Christmas gift! It was definately a very thoughtful gift and there must have been quite a lot of thought put into it with all the bits and pieces gathered with the instructions! So a big thank you for an extremely fun build and a great model that will definately stand out on the gaming table!

The kit consists of a plastic Warlord Games Universal Carrier with a PaK36 and it's crew from one of their 251 sets. The gun actually doesn't require too much modification with only a small part being cut off from it's mounting and a gun shield being built from plasticard. The driver and machine-gunner are both the original British crewmen with just a headswap. The uniform looks remarkably same as the German one even when checking it close up.

As my other German stuff is painted with a soft tone 3-colour camouflage I decided to do the same on this one. I just painted it randomly with my airbrush trying to leave about equal shares of each paint shade showing. After adding chipping I applied a gloss coat followed by a few different enamel washes. The washes were allowed to set in before being wiped off vertically. This already provides nice variation to the paint scheme, but I decided to add some streaking with rust and oil shades. When removing the shade I had some issues with the basecoat peeling off again. Vallejo grey primer doesn't really seem to bind very well to flat surfaces. Luckily all of the areas where this happened were in the bottom part of the model so I was able to hide them with the final muddying up.

Challenge progress

A quick update on all things hobby like. I finished up my Poilu a couple of days ago and should have it up here when the Challenge entries go up on Curt's blog. Otherwise I haven't been very active with painting the last couple of days. Even though I didn't feel like painting yesterday due to recovering from Friday I did manage to get some sculpting and converting work done to get ready for the next few Fortnight Challenges.

For the casualty entry I'm continuing my Ensign Kennedy project that was forgotten in my bitz box last spring. Last time he only really had the basic shape fleshed out so now I continued by finishing the jacket and his legs. I also added an arm for him and hands for the Sergeant. I still need to sand down some details and sculpt the young Ensigns sash and modify some bare head to look like his hair is dangling down.

For my "favorite character" I'm gonna go with a Nurgle Daemon Prince. He is converted from bitz off the Plague Drones and Daemon Prince kits. I'm still trying to figure out if I should use the fly head from a spawn box or one of the Daemon Prince heads with this guy. Using the fly head would be easier as I don't really need to sculpt a neck for him, but we'll see how I feel when I'm finishing him up :)

I also fixed a couple of NCO's arms for the Winter War project. Their arms come separate and really need some filling to get them looking natural. And on the background you can see the Turks going along. Blockpainted the basic uniform colors and all the metal parts. Next up painting all details.