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The Road to Panzerschreck: Painting Britsh Tanks in Caunter – Part 1

The Road To Panzerschreck – Painting Britsh Tanks in Caunter

The Road To Panzerschreck
Painting Britsh Tanks in Caunter
With James Brown

With Panzerschreck – the world’s oldest Flames Of War tournament – coming up next month, several of the studio guys are finishing armies to field in the event.

I have wanted to paint an Early War British desert tank company for years, primarily as an excuse to try the Caunter camouflage pattern, which I just love.

Panzerschreck is a doubles tournament, and I was originally going to be pairing with Phil Yates and his British Armoured Regiment. However, Phil is now going to be overseas on the weekend of Panzerschreck (more news to come on that later...) so now I will be teaming up with Chris Townley and his Marine Amphibian Tank Company. You know that famous Early War battle where the British Light Mk VIs were supported by the US Marines in their LVTs? Yeah, you know - the famous one. I think it was part of Operation Nonesuch.

Anyway, aside from the historically dubious teaming, I am trying to keep a fairly close eye on history with this force. Specicially, my army is going to represent 6RTR during Operation Compass.

The Road To Panzerschreck – Painting Britsh Tanks in Caunter
The Road To Panzerschreck – Painting Britsh Tanks in Caunter

The Light Mk VI tanks are mostly finished. They just need a couple of tank commanders and a few minor details like headlights.

My workmates often accuse me of getting a bit obsessed with very specific and fairly unimportant details. Maybe they're occasionally right. I decided I wanted to add names to each of my tanks, and for reasons I can no longer remember, I decided to ignore history and give them some 'cutesy' tank names: This took lots of fiddly slicing up of the names from US decal sheets. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and my wife likes them!

The Road To Panzerschreck – Painting Britsh Tanks in Caunter
The Road To Panzerschreck – Painting Britsh Tanks in Caunter
The Road To Panzerschreck – Painting Britsh Tanks in Caunter
The Road To Panzerschreck – Painting Britsh Tanks in Caunter
The Road To Panzerschreck – Painting Britsh Tanks in Caunter
The Road To Panzerschreck – Painting Britsh Tanks in Caunter

The numbers and platoon symbols on our British decal sheets didn't give me all the options I wanted, so I chopped and changed those a bit too.

Like a lot of people, I really like the jaunty look of penants on British tanks. I've made them before out of paper, but this time, to try to make something thinner and more 'to-scale', I experimented with making them from decals. It was a lot of effort, but it worked quite well.

While the Light Tanks are nearly finished, my cruisers and 15cwt trucks still have further to go. They currently have a glossy varnish, in preparation for a shading oil wash.

The Road To Panzerschreck – Painting Britsh Tanks in Caunter

The Road To Panzerschreck – Painting Britsh Tanks in Caunter

The Road To Panzerschreck – Painting Britsh Tanks in Caunter
The Road To Panzerschreck – Painting Britsh Tanks in Caunter

I look forward to showing you the finished army in a few weeks. I'll share some tips on painting the Caunter scheme, and also give some more detail on how I cut and mangled the decals to get exactly the markings I wanted – hopefully useful for any similarly 'OCD' modellers who would like to try the same thing.

Tally ho!

~ James.