So, some other stuff got in the way, but this one needs to be finished one of these days too …
I don’t have pictures of the wash-and-drybrush efforts after the previous photos, but it’ll show up in the next ones. Nothing much special to report about those anyway: an overall wash of thinned Army Painter Strong Tone and some drybrushing with
Revell Yellow Olive and Light Olive to bring out the details.
That done, I started on the markings yesterday. First, the black rectangles that Belgian vehicles invariably have on front, sides and rear. These have a white number at the top that indicates the unit, but that makes it hard to use
decals from another model because the number will usually be wrong. So, I measured up a decal from another model, found it was 8 by 6 mm, and masked things off to paint the rectangles by hand.
First, I cut an 8 mm piece of 6 mm masking tape as a template, so I could put it where the rectangle goes and then mask around it with more tape:
You only need one template, of course, because once you’ve masked one, you can remove it and put it in the next location you need to mask. All that remained was to paint inside with some matt black:
… and remove the tape:
I did find suitable division markings on the decal sheet from the old Italeri M108 kit, but it had a small error. The marking for 16 Armoured Division was a yellow lion’s head on a red and white shield, but the
decals had the shield in
black and white. Painting over it in red is not that hard with a fine brush, but due to red’s poor covering power, I had to do it in two steps, first with sand:
Left painted with sand, right as printed on the sheet. Then red over the sand:
Again, left with red, right only with sand. I initially did try only with red, but saw no difference with the black ink, so I quickly wiped it off again and went for the sand undercoat.
The
decals haven’t gone on yet, because after spending ages digging through my
decals for suitable numbers for the black rectangles, I found I will need to cut up some numbers and assemble them from loose digits, which I didn’t feel like doing anymore tonight.
I also painted the tracks and rubber tyres on the roadwheels:
The track was first sprayed with a rust/mud colour, and then I painted the metal parts with Italeri Gun Metal followed by the lighter Games Workshop Boltgun Metal, both so that they didn’t quite cover the colour below them. The idea was to leave the rust colour in the recesses and have the boltgun metal only on the more raised areas still.
The rubber was done in my usual way of painting it dark grey (Italeri Rubber) followed by thinned Indian ink and a drybrush with a medium–dark grey (Vallejo Bluegrey in this case).
On the engine deck, I painted the tow cables while I had the boltgun metal out, and then gave them a coat of
Tamiya Smoke to create shadows and give an oily effect:
I had bought a bottle of Vallejo Olivia Amarillo/Yellow Olive, since German (and Belgian) AFVs were finished in RAL 6014 yellow olive in the 1980s. This, though, is far too dark and green for that colour … Spot the issue at hand:
