Platanenmuster Camo - Axis Sturmgrenadiers
I've also been painting up a surprisingly large number of Sturmgrenadiers. I always hated the Antarctica camo from the FFG days, because, well, its pretty much just painting everything white. And part of the fun of painting something pseudo-historical is that you can paint as realistic a uniform as you want. I spend ages looking at real tanks and real uniform patterns before I pick the variant I am going with, and quite frankly there are a lot of variants!
For my Sturmgrenadiers I am painting a large proportion of them in a typical panzer grenadier camo smock. This involved a base coat of Army Painter Leather Brown, to which I then speckled small dashes of Citadel waargh green, Army Painter Matt Black and Desert Yellow.
As you'll see in the second picture, this looks a bit gaudy. So I muted it by giving an extremely dry dry brush of my Mig Afrika Korps Dust weathering fluid over the top. You see how this knocks all the colours back and blends them until it has more of the tone of the actual camo we based it off.
The Panzer grenadier uniform we based this off had smocks and camo trousers. But many troops just wore the smocks over their standard German green grey. This gives me three different troop variations - with with camo smock and trouser, with camo smock and with different camo helmet as well. The helmets without the goggles I paint like a standard German helmet. The shared camo smocks give the army a cohesive look, while the variance allows me to differentiate squads.
Of course, by the late war these guys would have been wearing pea dot. But that takes a much better painter than me to pull off!
For my Sturmgrenadiers I am painting a large proportion of them in a typical panzer grenadier camo smock. This involved a base coat of Army Painter Leather Brown, to which I then speckled small dashes of Citadel waargh green, Army Painter Matt Black and Desert Yellow.
As you'll see in the second picture, this looks a bit gaudy. So I muted it by giving an extremely dry dry brush of my Mig Afrika Korps Dust weathering fluid over the top. You see how this knocks all the colours back and blends them until it has more of the tone of the actual camo we based it off.
The Panzer grenadier uniform we based this off had smocks and camo trousers. But many troops just wore the smocks over their standard German green grey. This gives me three different troop variations - with with camo smock and trouser, with camo smock and with different camo helmet as well. The helmets without the goggles I paint like a standard German helmet. The shared camo smocks give the army a cohesive look, while the variance allows me to differentiate squads.
Of course, by the late war these guys would have been wearing pea dot. But that takes a much better painter than me to pull off!
