Painting Early War Panzer Grey on a Panzer II

A very fast and easy step by step tutorial for painting Panzer grey on Early War German tanks.


What you need

As usual i only use Vallejo colors. Here is the list:

• 70.826 German Camouflage Medium Brown
• 70.837 Pale Sand
• 70.862 Black Grey
• 70.863 Gunmetal Grey
• 73.200 Sepia Shade (Wash)

And 2 brushes: 1 small accurate one and 1 medium rough one (i choose for the “rough” a brush that can handle being abused).

The painting process

We start with the Panzer II that we have assembled and reviewed earlier this year. That poor thing has been lying around just begging for me to start painting it so i obliged.

First we use the medium brush and we fully paint the tank with Black Grey. Make sure to put out a thick layer as that will be our basecoat.

Yes, there are some places where the paint was shaved off by my big fingers however it’s irrelevant. If you can avoid doing that, all the better however don’t stress about it. The next step involves the wonderful Sepia Shade which i recently discovered. This “paint” is actually very diluted and leaves a trace behind, not an actual color. As you can see it leaves a nice shade of brown on the tank.

Next we have to drybrush the tank. Form a mix of Black Grey and Pale Sand to obtain a lighter version of Grey. I made 2 pictures so you can see what was my actual mix and how much paint i used.

Now heavy drybrush the tank with this mix. By heavy drybrushing i mean drybrush over and over the model until the paint actually sticks to it but does not enter recesses or lower zones. We use drybrush because if we would have used normal paint it would have covered everything up. Our aim here is to put a good Panzer Grey color on the tank and have the lowered zones darker (those are covered by the previous not lightened Black Grey).

Our job is mostly complete. Only thing to do now is to lightly drybrush the tracks with Gunmetal Grey to give them a metallic aspect. Don’t forget to also paint the gun and the machine gun in the turret in this color. Also it would not hurt to lightly drybrush the tools on the tank also, just for a bit more realism.

And to make them a bit more real we now lightly drybrush the Medium Brown on the tracks and the lower part of the wheels as seen in the picture. This will leave a hint of brown (simulating earth or mud) on them.

And done!