It would have been a lot quicker if I hadn’t gone leafing through that book about German armour in Africa, in which I found the picture of the real tankJust finished reading your build notes and next thing here it is complete.....
I bought it last year, and decided to paint it in desert colours due to this model. I would advise glueing it to a baseplate, like I did, because else it will be fairly flimsy. Actual painting was quick and simple: a sand colour, a medium brown wash, and then drybrushing with a couple of shades of lighter sand-coloured paint (or sand plus white at the end), that’s it. Everything all over the whole base, except that I kept the lightest colours to the higher areas that would catch the light. You can do much the same for other types of soil, then just add some static grass in areas. Go for itThe base came out well too, I've got a Heller vac formed one in the stash,but never got around to painting it up.
This is something that was also brought up on another forum, and the problem is: how do you represent dust on a vehicle that has pretty much the same colour as that dust already? I put dust on all the bits that have a different colour, like the jerrycans, the spare track links, etc. (and had to do that again because the first attempt hardly showed up at all), but when I tried to add dust effects to the sand-coloured tank itself, it just disappeared. Also, I’ve tried to paint what I see in the pictures of the real tank, and that doesn’t appear to have had much dust on places like its tyres, for example, so I didn’t try to put any there.One thing if I may, to my eyes it looks a bit "clean". This is not meant as a criticism, just me being anal as I have spent most of my life in the near and middle east including years living in Tobruk so I know how the dust gathers in no time at all.
It’s a piece of cloth I bought at a shop, together with some velcro sewed to two edges so I can stick it up into my collapsable photo booth. However, in retrospect I should have bought cloth of a finer weave. You can’t see it in the photo of the tank on the diorama base, but it does show up in the others, never mind in closeups of smaller parts.I also like the dark background for the photography (will try that myself, thanks!)
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