Goldilocks and the three paint colours

Following the posting of my latest vehicle painting yesterday, I was asked by @rexwithers on Twitter what the base colour was.

Therein lies a tale.

I’m a lazy painter, and I don’t really like mixing colours, so if there is a single colour shade I can use, fantastic.

When I put together all my German vehicles, I started basecoating using the Dunkelgelb Warspray from Plastic Soldier Company. When this ran out, I finished off the remaining vehicles using some old tins of GW Bubonic Brown.

However, in my thinking, the PSC Dunkelgelb was a bit too green (The Panzer IV in the above picture), and the Bubonic Brown a bit too brown (The Sdkfz 250/1). Now, you can get away with these colours once you’ve applied camouflage, shading and highlighting, but I then had some new models to paint, which included the two AA Gun Half-Tracks in the photo from the other day, and the PZ III in the above picture.

These were brush painted rather than spray painted, and I used the following colours:

I mixed the paint in an approximate ration of 3:1 Revell Sandy Yellow to Vallejo Middlestone. The Vallejo paint has quite a strong pigment, so you have to be careful that the final colour isn’t too green.

I’m happy with this colour, and will use it for the (few) remaining vehicles I have to basecoat. However, if you wanted to use a colour without mixing, I’m reliably informed that Army Painter Dark Yellow is just the job…

In the above picture, the Sdkfz 222 has a Bubonic Brown basecoat, the Sdkfz 251/1s PSC Dunkelgelb and the AA Half-Tracks and Flak 43 the colour mix I outlined above…