[newbie] Greetings and question

I believe the light sand was the color that vehicles were painted in at the factory after they switched from the dark gray.

Stripped as in? You mean chipped, gashed, Impact marks, rubbed or scraped off? What I think your asking is how to what we call weather it. Thats a lot of work and intails a lot of techniques. Most German armor was painted with a red or brownish red primer as a base coat. The camo during the time period your using was applied at the factory. You also need to take into account the anti-mine paste or zimmerit applied to the hull and turret during this time period. Thats for your question. There is just not enough space to explain how to do it to you here so I'll give you a quick one to try then you need to vist one of my favorite armor modeling sites Armorama.com. There you will find many indepth discussions and articles about weathering and a host of other armor subjects. Here's one you can try for chipped paint. First paint your model with red primer let it dry a couple of days. Dap on tiny points of a nonstick substance and then paint it the base color then the camo. After its all dry you can go back and easly lift or scrape the paint off where you put the nonstick revealing the primer underneath. You can even go further by applying the nonstick to the bare hull you painted steel or rust before you painted it with the primer. This is a very realistic looking method though there are easier ways to do it. But in my opinion not as realistic looking if you don't have the experiance to do it.