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Greetings!

'A gaping silken dragon,/Puffed by the wind, suffices us for God./We, not the City, are the Empire's soul:/A rotten tree lives only in its rind.'

Friday 21 February 2014

Ochre...

... cheered on by DaveM, I went for the ochre look for the PSC Pz IVHs:


Here they are with the base coats in place. I used Revell acrylic ochre, which, like all the Revell acrylics is pretty thick, not far from being a paste - rather apt I suppose for German late war tank painting. So, this is what three pretty heavily diluted coats looks like over the black undercoat. Reasonable, I'd say, and, yes, I really do think I prefer the more yellowy look to the greeny hue.



And, being Friday, it was time for a beer:


 Brakspear (pronounced brakespear) Oxford Gold. I'm an Oxford man myself (Nuffield and Wolfson), so I'll have to say it is a fine beer - and it is! Light, clear tasting. Good stuff.



And I like the bee emblem too. Bees and beehives have a long history as symbols, of course; first because of sweetness - 'out of strength came sweetness', and then of a native, English, socialism. By the early 19th Century, the English working man and woman used the beehive as their political symbol - much, much more useful and gradualist a symbol than that which emerged from the twisted imaginings of German philosophy. The hammer and sickle was little but a threat, but the beehive and the bee - good enough to adorn an ale.

9 comments:

  1. That Corsican Johnny was fond of the bee as well, if memory serves. Nice work on the panzers, I had wondered if you'd invested in an airbrush as it seemed such a neat job and the coverage was so good.

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    1. Now was he, the rascal? I'd thought that he stuck to the 'N' with laurel wreaths. Was it the implication of industriousness that attracted him?
      No, no airbrush - although I have often thought about one, only they seem so expensive. Just a lot of thinning of the paste like Revell acrylic, then gentle brushing.

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  2. Always a bit hard to judge from online pics, but that Revell colour looks a tad "sandier" than the Humbrol ochre. Darker disruptive colours (3-colour scheme ?) and maybe a filter will certainly tone down the whole effect.

    Cheers, Dave

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    1. Hi, Dave, yes, in the flesh, as it were, it looks less sandy. It might also have been that I used three coats of pretty heavily diluted paint over the black. While searching through my paints tonight, I came across a Games Workshop paint with some utterly stupid name that I thought might do for German ochre. But, that way lies even more madness!

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  3. Nothing to do with bees or ochre but since your sidebar mentions "Sapper" you might like this
    http://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/the-making-of-an-officer/

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    1. Hi, Michael. Yes, I've got that blog on 'favourites', although I have to confess that I don't visit it often. I was, in the past, very taken with the history of the Great War (I also wrote my D.Phil. thesis on British combatant writers and the Great War), but, as I've got older, I find myself shying away from it all. Odd.

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    2. Not that odd at all, really, my dear chap. I did my DPhil on late medieval English chivalric literature, and at the time I couldn't get enough of the Middle Ages. At some point I had my fill.

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  4. Tanks look great and a good choice of beer. Does the copy of Funnybones suggest you are doing research for a skeleton/zombie army perchance?

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    1. No, but I do love 'Funnybones' - now on the second generation of small boy bed time reading - we love it, '"Good idea", said the big skeleton'...

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