Intermezzo in Historia

Reading between the lines of my previous posts you might get the sense that I'm burning out on the death guard. And you would be right!


One of my personal challenges is that my mind is constantly bursting with new idea's, new projects...a typical example of  "the new shiny thing"-syndrome. I'm easily enthusiasmed by an  idea.
This has it benefits but also some serious pitfalls.


To prevent rushing the death guard to subpar completion. I've partly given in to the sentiment that I needed to do something other than death guard. Last October I've started painting a tiny (1/48 scale) PanzerKampfWagen IV Ausf H. The occasion/motivation for it was a half day workshop at scale model challenge in Veldhoven, the Netherlands. I had the opportunity to follow this workshop from Jose luis lopez, diving into his Black & White technique for painting scale models. during this short course I prepared my Black and white undercoat for the panzer with some tricks here and there to extra highlight some interesting features of the model. Afterwards a very thin and controlled "Dunkelgelb" was applied. But after the workshop, the panzer remained WIP on my desk. Constantly reminding that something had to be done, But I never took it up.


So back to the present situation: I needed a distraction and the panzer needed attention, so we found each other. In the following pictures you can find the current state of the tank: after the airbrushing I added scratches, started painting some of the details & gave it all a nice coat of Tamiya X22 clear. All in preparation of the following oily steps!
Some important things to note are the lack of Schürtzen. I've convinced myself to try and soler some nice edged brass. This however wasn't finished in time for the workshop. So it still needs to happen.

And what would be a lonely panzer without some interesting setting. So during the last couple of evenings, I've built a solid foundation for a nice environment for this vehicle.

As a consequence, I've given myself the challenge of some serious conversions on a couple of resin figures. But that will be a different story.

Here's the current mock up of this vignette.

Down in Southern Russia a PzIv is guided across an improvised bridge with the help of the dismounted crew. Simple, yet I hope effective. Comments, remarks and ideas are greatly appreciated as I am a bit out of my comfort zone in this strange historical part of the hobby :-D