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The little StuG that could

When I started painting miniatures it took me a while to get the hang of it. When I finally started to conquer my fears, I thought how hard could vehicles be especially given their size.

Well the first vehicle I painted, a StuG III (my favourite AFV BTW), it was a disaster. The little I learnt from painting figures did not translate. This put me back to square one and I then concentrated on painting only figures and put vehicles, like I used to minis, in the too hard basket, something I would never be able to do.

Well after painting a few US vehicles and, now with confidence, ordering a couple more I decided to go back and look at my first StuG.

So of course I was nervous and wanted to go a good job originally. It was also my favourite vehicle and wanted to do it justice. I bought it, assembled it (which I had not done much of before) and then decided on a colour. I didn't really care that much for historical 'down to the commanders buttons' I just wanted to see how I could paint a vehicle and hoped I got a good outcome. For anyone who has seen my Gaslands post I talk about my first car I tried to paint there. Well that was the second vehicle I had ever painted after this StuG and I still didn't really know what I was doing (clearly).

So onto the shameful pictures! Unfortunately I do not have a picture of the tank in various stages, but the below pictures should give you an idea.

First thing I did was prime the tank, a space wolves kind of blue-grey. I really like this colour and it was what I had on hand so I thought I would use it for a proof of concepts.

While I am writing this, thinking about back then, its so hard when you haven't built up the skills and knowledge of what to do. At that initial stage you don't have a lot of hobby stuff and making do rarely works. Its even hard to know what to search online to get the answers you need...anyway.

This is a picture of the underside of the tank, I kept it like this so I remember how far it came.


You can see from this picture the 'space wolves' primer, which actually didn't look too bad (had I known what to do). The mucky colour is a wash, well kinda. It was a watered down black paint as I didn't have a wash and didn't really want to buy one as I wasn't sure I would enjoy painting (well it turned out that I didn't enjoy it because I didn't have the tools of the trade!). As you can see the black paint is too watery which meant that it didnt shade effectively enough and was blotchy and streaky. This was over the entire tank. What made things worse was the primer was very light and the black didnt settle in all of the recesses well and I lost my confidence right there. It looked terrible. I put it away and gave up.

As I said over the weekend, a bit wiser, I pulled it out again and still wasn't impressed. I was also stuck with what to do with it, except throw it away which I was considering as recent as Saturday morning. I thought I would give it one last try and hit it with a heavy wash of agrax earthshade and see how it looked when it dried. Well apart from a lot darker, not much better.

Resigning to thrown it out, I was looking at it on my desk when I was waiting for the PVA to dry on my boards. I thought well I will just see what it looks like with a bit of a dry-brush. I did it, it looked okay. So I thought it would be good for some practice and I painted in a few of the details...started to look okay...apply a few decals (which was another fear I conquered) and finished it up.

Here is the final image.



I am not saying it is the best thing I ever painted or the colours are great etc but I cant believe how far it has come. I am not not embarrassed to put it on the table in a pinch and cant believe how I resurrected this little StuG!

With a back story filled with adversity like this, I am sure it will perform well on the tabletop!

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