Trial and error

I finally got the tracks done (my good friend "I'm not used to doing this anymore" was bothering me again), the left side was done in almost one go. When I had the last track links in their places and the glue had set overnight, I started fooling around with my paints.

 

Just in case I decided to start my painting project with the outside of the armour skirts. I got the awesome idea of using the track sprue as a support for the skirt pieces, because my experiences with the through-sweated painter's tape that I had used in the summer weren't too good: that damn tape left some annoying glue marks in the skirt pieces while I was basecoating them. My main point was to see that the airbrush didn't spit around or misbehave in other ways either. After that I could move on to the Sturmpanzer itself with a bit easier mindset.

That was easier said than done. A couple of times I had to turn off the airflow from the air can because the paint stopped flowing completely. I admit, I'm at a complete loss with that thing sometimes, in my previous attempts I managed to make that thing shoot extremely cold air instead of paint - just because I had opened the air valve a bit too much (how could I have known?). This can be marked as another lesson learned. Maybe my today's failures were because I hadn't cleaned the airbrush too well after my brief and unsuccesful painting attempt yesterday. That's yet another thing I have to learn with these things.

Now my Brummbär is happily green, next I'll use more brown and yellow to get some kind of a form-breaking camouflage applied. My biggest problem will be how to paint the Schürtzen reasonably. Maybe it's enough that the "insides" are just plain green while the outsides have the camo pattern? I mean, no one's really supposed to see the insides anyway because they're so low and close to the hull of the tank. As long as the insides of the armoured skirts aren't painted with plain Panzergrau or any bright colour, this should be fine.

The last photo shows pretty weel how the front of the hull is bad. Of course I noticed that way too late because of my apparently silly order of building. I decided to cheat and cover the hole with extra track links. As you can see in the photo, the leftmost one wasn't glued well enough (as I had suspected) and the airflow of the airbrush just blew it away. Obviously I reglued it after I had taken the photos.
There's still a small gaping hole on the right side, I have to come up with something for that, too.


I'll paint the tracks last, for at this point it'd make no sense at all. Either I'd try to mask them (and notice that some paint leaked anyway) or I'd try to avoid painting on them with the camouflage colours. Fat chance it'd work as I want. So I'll paint as usual and work on the tracks last, just before I start applying some weathering to them. Before I start with weathering I'll have to remember to paint a bunch of modified Balkenkreuz on the hull and the Schürtzen..

Maybe this'll end up being something...