Painting Guide: D-Day Sherman by Dave Taylor
Our friend and supersize army painter Mr Dave Taylor has cleaned up his brushes and painted our DD Sherman in quick steps for you to follow…
Preparing for Overlord!
While I was visiting Nottingham in the week after Salute, I had the pleasure of getting a guided tour of the sprawling Warlord Games operations. I’ve known a lot of the team for quite a few years (decades, in some cases) and was able to convince them that a guided tour would be a great idea. During that tour I saw the very cool D-Day wading Sherman being lovingly removed from silicone moulds in the resin casting area.
With the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings fast approaching, I thought it would be cool to paint up and add to the US troops I painted swiftly last year for a chapter in Armies & Legions & Hordes, a book that I wrote to present my views/thoughts/philosophies on painting wargaming armies and collections. The chapter on my Bolt Action Americans was focused on talking about how to manage your hobby time, work to a deadline, and maximize your effort for a solid result.
I wasn’t able to snag the D-Day Sherman out of the resin room (something about stock counts and pre-orders), but last week a package arrived on my doorstep from Warlord Games. I quickly busted it out, did the little bit of clean up that was required (very little, really) and assembled the Sherman. It all went together well, and the trickiest part was actually popping in the lights and cages for the lights at the front of the tank. I recommend having some tweezers handy.
I started out by priming the tank with a black spray primer. The wading skirt creates a few difficult areas to get to on the inside, so make sure you take your time and get everything covered.
My first painting step was to paint all of the armour with VMC Brown Violet. It’s the same colour I used for the vehicles in my original US army, and I’m a big fan of it.
The next step was to paint the wading skirt. I used a mix of VMC Desert Yellow and VGC Bonewhite.
I thought I’d get a fairly good coverage over the black but, in the end, I wasn’t completely satisfied. A second coat was needed.
I then moved on to the various pieces of stowage, painting them with various canvas and cloth colours, including VMC Khaki, VMC English Uniform, and VMC US Dark Green.
The next, very familiar, step was to apply a wash over the entire model. I used my perennial favorite – The Army Painter’s Strong Tone. I used the acrylic from the bottle so that it would match the rest of my army, and set it aside to dry.
Once the Strong Tone had dried, I wanted to put a bit more tonal variation back into everything. I lightly drybrushed the armour with a Brown Violet/Bonewhite mix (tending towards the Brown Violet) and highlighted the various stowage elements. The final stage was drybrushing the wading skirt. I started with drybrushing the original mix over all of the skirt and followed that up by mixing in quite a bit of white and confining that to the top half of the skirt to simulate the top parts drying out first, as well as the evaporating seawater leaving some salty residue behind.
The tanks were drybrushed with some VMC Beige Brown to represent some of the road dust that they would have picked up as soon as they got off the beaches.
I hope you like the final result! If you want to check out my original Bolt Action US army (and what I went through to complete it) you can pick up a copy of Armies & Legions & Hordes from the Warlord Games webstore HERE.
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