At the same time I was experimenting with the tank images I looked at doing smaller scale weapons pictures. Most WW2 small arms had been done to death but I’d always noticed that in every game where it was represented, the Panzerfaust always seemed wrong.

There’s apparently a few reasons for this.

Firstly good period reference is actually quite scarce, at least reference that is of any use to a modeller/texturer. Secondly, while tens of thousands of these were mass produced at the end of the war, comparatively few survive and are accessible to the public. Thirdly, they were mass produced in many different factories under varying conditions from increasingly scarce materials and man power. The quality and build varied so how can you judge what is correct? Fourthly, most of the reference material on the net was of reproduction/re-enactors models which were themselves largely inaccurate (or at least had some glaring errors)

So I went to great pains to reproduce one particular kind of Panzerfaust but like many before me found it very difficult to get good information. Many variations had additional labels and stencils, others had fewer. But what is on my particular labels is as exact as I could get, except for the font. I just couldn’t find an equivalent font. Some had Feuer stencilled on the trigger, some had it on a paper label, most had nothing. Some had the main warning and arrows on the other side or upside down. Most had the extra instructions on the top but many did not.

The colour is a fair representation of dunkelgelb. There’s a company that provide ‘accurate’ model paint of all the RAL numbers and even provide equivalent RGB and CMYK values. But many were painted in the brighter gelbbraun, in sandgrau or the darker dunkelgrun. Some were put together from different pre-painted batches. I tried to represent the less than perfect spray painting with a very slight variation in paint opacity and splattering.

I created the label from scratch based on photos of supposed originals. It took a long time to pin down the correct wording and spelling. The font is again very wrong. The stencilling is correct for most 60m Panzerfausts.

Rendered straight from Lightwave without any post save for the terrible watermarks. Sorry about that.