510 Schwere Panzer-Abteilung King Tigers - First Photos

The various paint sets from Ammo of MIG have finally come in, so I'm starting to paint up the 510 Schwere Panzer-Abteilung vehicles.  As I mentioned before, 510's vehicles were devoid of markings, so I'm having to be creative in my distinction of the platoons.  Fortunately of the six or so vehicles the King Tiger company fielded in the Ruhr pocket, at least three distinct camouflage patterns were evident:  ambush, green octopus, and yellow spray over primer.

I've started with the green octopus scheme and primer tanks first.  As I now I have full modulation sets for these colors, it was time to go crazy, as it were.  I've done panel shading on 1/35th scale kits to great effect, but I've had mixed success at 15mm scale.  With the new paints I hoped to break through in small scale. Two good Iwata airbrushes, including a Custom Micron for the small detail work, shouldn't hurt my cause either. 

I started with base coats.  I ended up using the "dark base" versions of both the primer red and olive green as I thought the shadow may be too dark.  Also, my olive green set was combined with a chocolate brown, so I only had three modulation colors.

The base coats went on without any problem, and soon it was time to begin my exercise in modulation.  In short, it went very well.  I used more layers on the primer version (because I had them available) than the green, but as you can see from the photos below, the results were spectacular!

Flush with excitement, I went ahead and tried to finish up the paint job on the red primer example.  The artist rendering I have in Trojca's King Tiger book shows an over-spray of panzer yellow in several key areas. To get this right I pulled out the custom micron.  Unfortunately I lost the natural light which shows off the panel shading so well, so some of the details are lost.

You can still make out some of the shading, but the light is washing out some of the more subtle effects.  One fun aspect of the primer red King Tiger is it had two track-guards on the left side from an ambush pattern King Tiger.

I'm hoping to get some better pictures that really show off the modulation sometime this week.  I've also gotten about half of the base coats down on the ambush King Tigers, as well as the Ersatz SS Panzer Platoon. So far I'm pleased with how my exercise in modulation at 1/100th scale is turning out, and I'm even more impressed how quickly I was able to get the painting done.