Tutorial: How to make a white winter camo

Winter's camo are some of the most looked by modelers, it can be used over the 3 majors armies of the WW2 conflict (German, Soviet or American's) tanks and vehicles.

This technique I'll be describing here under can also be used for other camo like the desert camo.

Vehicles used for a long period in desert operations like the Afrika Korps or more recently in Irak are also a good exemple on how we can use this technique. The DAK vehicle were painted in dark grey and later on painted with desert tone over the dark grey.
With the combined effects of sand and wind the desert tone is removed or almost washed letting the dark grey coat appearing.

I even used this technique on my wreck tank, where I wanted to get the dark green colour almost washed off of the tank revealing the rust tone underneath.

So back to our winter camo, a little description of what you will need:

Chipping fluid or hairspay
Thin Brush N°00
Flat brush N°3
Round brush N°2
Custom made round brush, I used a round brush with hard bristle and cut the top
Tap water
Enamel Thinner


AK Interactive:

AK013 Rust Streaks
AK017 Earth Effect
AK024 Dark Streaking Grime
AK089 Heavy Chipping Fluid (if you are not using hairspray)

Tamiya acrylics:

XF-2 Flat White
XF-10 Flat Brown
X-18 Semi Gloss Black

Dark yellow wash (I'm making my own wash. When I'm brush painting, I'm using a recipient to clean my brushes. One for the dark tones like green or black, one for the brown and one for the sand or dark yellow. At the end of the day, I'm not throwing these tainted water, I let the paint settle down to the bottom of the recipient over the night. On the new day, I'm removing the excess of water as most of the paint and pigments are laying on the bottom. I'm recovering this very diluted paint into an old Tamiya bottle and my wash is ready. When I need it, I've only to shake the bottle before use. You can do it by diluting paint directly but it's just that I don't like to waste things.As this is water based, it will be useful to wash the paint out.

Here is the Tiger I'll use for this tutorial, the tank was first painted with the usual German camo and once dry, a coat of satin varnish is sprayed over all the model.

I recommend you to work on one area at a time, so the chipping fluid or the hairspray isn't too dry when you will be removing the white paint.

So, first a coat of hairspray or chipping fluid is sprayed. You need to protect the areas you're not working on with masking tape.

Once this coat is dry, it is time to spray the white. An other important point: the mapping, meaning you must spray less paint in some areas compares to others. Also depending of the effect you want to achieve very worn or not, you must spray less paint.

With a mix of dark yellow wash and tap water, using a flat brush, with vertical movement from top to bottom. It is important to get the brush barely wet. If your brush is wet or too wet you will remove more paint.

It is important to know where you want or need to remove the white. The areas where the crews are climbing on the tank or passing must reveal more of the original paint. The same with the edges, hatches, tool boxes etc.

Slowly, with low pressure on your brush, you will wet the paint, that will came off.

On the top of turret and flat areas on the hull, I'm using the hard brush, here not moving from top to bottom but in circles:

  This is how the turret looks now with the white paint being partially removed.

It is now time for the most laborious part, the bare metal chips. I prefer to do them with acrylics, as later we will use enamels for the streaking etc. For the bare metal colour, I'm mixing X-18 Semi Gloss Black  XF-10 Flat Brown. To drawn them I'm using a small thin 00 brush. In some areas I'm using the sponge technique too. I added some chips and streaks of dark yellow and dark grey in various places.

As you can see, by using a water based wash, diluted with tap water, this is creating light streaks and shadows.


We now have to let it dry for few hours before going to the next step: Streaking and dusting.

Now that our turret is dry, we can work on the model without damaging the previous work.

On some of the chips done previously, using the rust streaks I'm drawing small irregular lines.
The same with the streaking grime.
After a few minutes, with a thin round brush wetted in thinner, I'm stumping them.

On the welding lines, I'm putting first some thinner followed by small drops of streaking grime. In various places, I added rust, also blend with thinner.

Finally around the hatches, welding lines etc I'm adding earth colour again blended with thinner.

As you can see, it isn't hard or complicated to get a nice weathered winter wash for our tanks and vehicle.