Welcome to 2015's first installment of Flames of War Fridays. As I'm still deciding what projects I'll be working on this year lets take a closer look at one of last years projects; painting the Japanese Light Sensha platoon

Paints Used

• Army Painter Matt Black Spray Primer
• Vallejo IJA Tsuchi-Kusa Iro Primer
• Vallejo Model Air White
• Vallejo Model Air Gunmetal
• Vallejo Model Colour Flat Brown
• Vallejo Model Colour Reflective Green
• Vallejo Model Colour Yellow Ochre
• Vallejo Model Colour Black
• AK Interactive Track Wash
• AK Interactive Streaking Grime
• White & Black Artist Oil Paints

Step One: Priming

As the HaGo miniatures are a combination of metal and resin components I first primed them with a spray of Army Painter Matt Black to give the best surface adhesion. Its best to apply spray primers in several light coats, to avoid it pooling or going on to thick.

Then I airbrushed a second primer layer of Vallejo IJA Tsuchi-Kusa Iro, however you can also apply this range of primers with a brush. This earth green tone is one of the main colours used by the Imperial Japanese Army for their armoured vehicles, so this second primer layer also served as the basecoat.

Step Two: Modulation (Optional)

Modulation is typically used at larger scales than Flames of War miniature, however I still like to use the technique to add a little more colour depth to my tanks but its purely a personal preference and not required.

If you're using an airbrush simply add a few drops of white to your base colour and then apply this lighter shade to areas of the model where light would naturally strike.

Step Three: Adding the Camouflage

The next step was to add some hard-edged camouflage patterns and rather than try to mask off the rather small tanks I went with the much easier option of applying it by hand with a brush.

Firstly I painted areas of Flat Brown, covering roughly 1/3rd of the tank's hull and then added a second pattern of Reflective Green, covering a little less area than the brown.

The final camouflage stage was painting the distinctive wavy yellow cross, which was done using a fine detail brush and Yellow Ochre.

Step Four: Detail Basecoats

The machine gun barrels were first painted Black and then given a quick drybrush of Gunmetal. The tracks were base-coated with Gunmetal and finally I also picked out the edges of the road wheels in black, which is one of my least favourite jobs.

Step Five: Washes

Weathering the tracks is very simple, simply apply some Track Wash and let it dry. I then applied a pin-wash to the whole tank using Streaking Grime. At this point the tanks are now painted to a decent tabletop quality and it would also be quite easy to bring out the detail even more with a few edge highlights.

Step Six: Oil Shading & Highlights (Optional)

Instead of doing edge highlights I wanted to try out using some oil paint techniques at 1:100 scale, which was actually pretty straightforward.

I started with adding some shadow effects, by applying some small dots of black artist oil paints into the deepest areas of the tank such as under the track guards and under the open turret hatches.

Then I used a brush with some white spirit to smooth out the black dots into a blended shadow, which faded out naturally as it came out into the light.

I then added some highlights using the same technique, just using dots of white oil paint instead. The image below shows the before and after difference, with the shaded and highlighted model on the left.

Step Six: Weathering

To finish the models off I added some weathering with Streaking Grime before protecting the paint jobs with a coat of gloss varnish, followed by a matte varnish to get rid of the shine.

Here's the three completed Ha-Go tanks in my Light Sensha platoon.