Workbench: Changing Gears

For a little change of pace we'll go step by step of a batched painting of a Humber IV recce group.
Here they are primed and painted in the mass produced and monotonous olive drab that nearly every Normandy British equipment was in.
We'll first paint the tires. A lot of people make the mistake of painting them black, and while tires are "black" a keen eye might notice that where the light shines it tends to be a little more gray. So we'll mix up some paint for the purpose and give use some color depth to make shadows in the creases of the tires later on.
Here they are painted and already looking nice. A lot of people stop here. We're going to do better.
Scuffing! What self respecting recce company stays on the road all the time? With a little off gray dabs and streaks where the armor might have been scratched we can create an undertone for lost paint.

Now some heavy (but diluted) black ink goes a long way in making our off gray tires look more realistic.

Now with a thinner black ink you can wash the whole mini, but I prefer to just bring out the paneling like so.

Now here was a fuax pas on my part. The rattle can spray primer green I was using... I could not exactly recreate. Nonetheless you don't really need to for this stage. Normally you'd take a shade lighter than the undertone and lightly drybrush the miniature to bring out the edges. Instead, I got a close green and then brought it a shade to brown.

Now we throw on some mud. For this, I just used a roughly close but different brown and applied it around the wheels where mud would fling and across the front of the Humbers.

Add the blue/green markers of the 15th Recce Regiment, Royal Armoured Corps as attached to the 15th Scots. I should have done this earlier, but now is good too. Just have to dirty them up after painting them.

???

Paint details, use a little brown makeup powder to simulate dirt in recesses, dullcoat/seal, and enjoy 2 more infantry stands.

That is an in scale Panther tank in the background (I didn't paint it)... those wacky Germans and their ridiculously huge production tanks.