Tamiya 1/35 Königstiger

These are some pretty big pictures, so go ahead and click on some to get them full sized.

As promised, here are some pictures of my 1/35 Tamiya King Tiger. This is the Ardennes kit, and I was actually able to find some photos of 204, the tank I built, after the US Army captured it. As far as I could tell from the photos, the tank did not have zimmerit, nor did it have the late war "ambush" paint scheme. It did, however, have "hard edge" three color camouflage. This was the first model I had ever airbrushed, and I didn't quite feel up to masking and spraying, so I did a soft edge spray.

I built the tank before painting, so I had to prime the undercarriage with dark brown and drybrush the wheels and tracks.

I primed the body of tank with Tamiya panzer yellow, then sprayed the green and brown camouflage. I gave the tank an all over wash with dark burnt umber oil paint, then a pin wash with various shades of oils, including black, Indian red, and burnt sienna. When the oil wash was dry, I drybrushed the tank with panzer yellow. Now I affixed the cables and spare tracks. I had primed them with Tamiya gunmetal. I picked out all the tools with craft acrylic paints. Then I applied the decals and began weathering.

The first stage in weathering was to apply scratches with a silver colored pencil. Then I used a reddish brown acrylic to paint some rust around rivets. Finally I used some panzer yellow and some brown to do some paint chipping.

Once the painting was done, I sealed the tank with a clear gloss acrylic from PollyScale. Finally I hit it all over with a can of Testor's Dullcote. Here's the tank at the end of painting.

The last stage was weathering with pastel chalks. I bought a cheap set from Michael's and got to work this morning. The wheels and undercarriage got a heavy dusting of straight black, as did the area around the muzzle. I used a dark brown on the tracks and coming up the sides of the mud guards. Then the whole tank got a liberal application of bright tan dust. The last stage was applying a red brown to simulate rust. I wanted this tank to look like it was on active service, so I rusted and dirtied it up a great deal.

I'm sure you can find many mistakes on the tank; I know I can. But this is the first serious 1/35 tank I've ever painted. I'm pretty happy with how this initial effort turned out.