GZG walkers; painted

Two representative samples as completed. I decided that they had to be based on rigid bases because even after the limited handling involved in painting them, I could feel the legs working their way loose.

The camo pattern is loosely based on the 1980s MERDC patterns used by the US and still widely used in countries which were getting US military aid around that time; you can still see it on Korean and Greek and Turkish vehicles among others. The eight MERDC patterns were based on greens and browns. The prettiest of them was the almost never used woodland summer scheme which used dark green, light green and small highlights in black and sand. However, the only one which you ever really saw was the woodland temperate, which was half brown, half dark green with highlights in black and sand. In Greece, the sand was often replaced by light grey. I used the rough template, but replaced green with light grey, highlights being grey green and mid brown.

I did not repeat the mistake of blackwashing the entire vehicle, instead opting for the fiddly, annoying and never particularly satisfactory technique of blacklining the panels. This looks quite garish in the photos above, but at arms length on a table it will be fine, particularly in the rather feeble lighting conditions prevailing on wargames tables. All successful figure painters wind up going one of two ways. Either their technique improves to the point where their figures look wonderfully lifelike and win prizes, or they realise that the figure only has to look convincing at three feet under a sixty watt bulb and their technique becomes all about getting roughly useful effects in the shortest possible time. I went down the second path years ago, and with every year that passes, I find new ways to avoid putting any more work into painting than is absolutely necessary for the objective in hand - which is generally to put a lot of figures on a table to a deadline.

Photos were taken in natural light around the middle of a very rainy day. On a bright day they could probably have been done hand held, but with the overcast conditions the meter was showing 1/15 of a second at f2.2, and it seemed safest to use the tripod and the remote release. Interestingly, the White Balance setting on the Sony for cloud gave the wrong colour balance; I got the most faithful results with the sunlight setting.