I've been building and painting my own DAK army for Flames of War for a while now, so I thought it would be nice to paint up some tanks for TMP. 
Editor in Chief Bill 
had some Crusader tanks that he wanted painted, so I quickly stepped in and soon the tanks were in my mailbox… They didn't make it onto the painting table as soon as I'd hoped, but I've finally gotten around to working on them - and now you get to see the result!
I decided to paint these tanks as units from the 3rd Army, 7th Division. I hope I got the markings and placement at least close, but I had a lot of trouble finding clear, color reference photos. If things aren't exactly right you tank aficionados have my apologies!
The first order of business was cleaning and assembly and… Damage Control!!! One of the tanks had been mashed at some point (shipping, packing, who knows?) - I found one of the pieces when I opened the blister but the rest was absent, so I tend to think this happened at the factory. I could have contacted Battlefront to get a replacement, but I wanted to finish this article, so I decided to forge ahead!
I used greenstuff to fix the damage.
Green putty is not the best choice for repair on something like a tank - it stays a bit flexible when cured, and while it holds detail very well, other putties (like brown) are better for smooth planes and sharp edges because they can be scraped/shaved when dry.
I decided to honor the manufacturers' slip by given the tank some battle damage on my repair:
Next was assembly. Battlefront's tanks come as resin hulls with metal tracks, barrels, crew and fittings. In the case of these tanks, the resin parts were exactly as bad as what I've come to expect from resin miniatures - lots of rough spots/molded-on resin chips and the like. The spots where the tracks glue on were particularly bad, with large bubbly lumps of resin that needed to be cut, chipped, and filed away. The metal parts were much better, with minimal mold offsets and some flash in the small spaces of the tracks.
The tanks I got from Editor in Chief Bill are two Crusaders III's (with the flat turret front) and a Crusader II. I decided to assemble the II without the supplementary MG turret (I saw both versions in my research), and to include a tank commander for some variety.
I basecoated the tanks with the color circled in red in the photo below, and then gave them a medium wash of brown and red-brown ink to bring out the detail and represent dust and dirt gathering the crevices.
