I painted the AA gun on the sprue for convenience, leaving it attached by the back of the gun. I also but some black wash around the side exhaust as I noticed that this tended to get grimy pretty quickly on current T-72. Possibly a little extreme for modern paints so I did this in moderation. I then went over the larger chips, adding a spot of VMC German Camo Black Brown to the centre of the scratch to reflect paint being work down. as ever, the aim is to make the tank look like its been in use, NOT that its ready to be sold for scrap! Once that was dry I dipped a bit of blister sponge into VMC German Camo Bright Green and then started dabbing it on areas of high wear and tear such as the hatches, stowage bins, fenders, drop down bulldozer blade and the underside of the tank. I assumed East Germans would stick with standard German numbering! I applied a bit of decal softener so the numbers would follow the stiffening ridges of the bins. Wear and Tearīefore “distressing” the camo I applied three digit tank numbers to the side ammo tins. I also picked out the MG ammo tin on the right side in VMC Olive Drab with Brown Violet highlights. As such, I went back over some blocks, of all three colours, with alternative shades of green, namely Vallejo Model Colour Bright Green, Reflective Green and Brown Violet. One thing I noticed in photos of the T-72B1 was that the blocks can have surprising degree of variation in shade of green. the fact that there seems to be templates for some vehicles suggest the intention was to match so I tried to do roughly the same on each tank, though I didn’t sweat it too much the crews would ‘sing from the same hymn sheet’ but some variation is is to be expected. I couldn’t find out if tanks were meant to vary or match. I was probably a little too broad and may don’t have enough green showing so that is something to consider. I started with the “Black Grey” areas, trying to keep the camo on the sides at 60 degree then progressing in broad swathes over the hull and turret. I decided that messing around with masking putty was going to take too long so I opted for a soft edge camo using the airbrush unassisted. The few examples of the contemporary three-tone scheme show a hard edged look to the camo. The other two colours I elected to use Vallejo Model Air Panzer Dark Grey for the “Black Grey” and VMA Aggressor Grey” for the “Dusky Grey”. The NATO Green primer did a pretty good job approximating the lighter East German base colour so that provided my first colour. I then noticed I had basically replicated the VSP NATO Green primer so subsequently used that going forward! This was applied to both turret and hull, all over. On the first tanks I used Vallejo Surface Primer Bronze Green then went over this with various shade of green trying to capture the lighter German green that seems to exist. I covered this process on my T-72M way back in 2017 and the methodology still holds up. On the T-72B, I rebuilt the cupola to put the cupola MG to the rear and make the open hatch a bit more true to the real life example. I built the kits pretty much as per the instructions. The implementation orders stipulate the colours (black grey and dusky grey over the standard olive green), that the olive green was to remain uncovered on 45-60% of the tank, that the camo must be asymmetric, aligned at 30 or 60° to the vertical, no patch smaller than 0.5m2 and any hatches should be in the dark colour or in the intersection of two bands. The three-tone was largely left to the crews to execute, with some guidelines. However, a speculative tank could have a rare scheme in my opinion. In reality, this scheme had only been adopted by a small portion of the East German forces (likely less than a single percent) before reunification. One of the things I wanted to do with the T-72B was to paint it in the East German three-tone camo. BF offered to send us a couple boxes of T-72B and SU-17 Fitters so its time to get the paint brushes out and get these bad boys painted. Recently I have been writing a fair bit on the new T-72B1, including a plan on how to slot it into my existing East German force.
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