Finally I got to the painting phase

Groundwork, it's not spectacular

Hah, for a change I begun with a pic of those pieces I've been talking about for a couple of weeks. To clarify this to those who can't read my mind and those who don't find my mind's workings as clear as I do: those pieces on the foreground are the armor parts that I cut down a bit, in the upper right corner you can see the Combat Engineering Equipment Boxes and on the top you find a bunch of those infamous wheels & co. All the unpainted core parts are naturally those places where the connecting bolts go, I haven't forgotten them. To be more exact: I'm not so demented yet that I'd paint even those even if I knew that they'd be completely blocked by the bolts, glued shut and that no one would ever see them. Ever.

Look into the horizon

Ok, so I finally grabbed myself by the neck and started priming the model. The turret and the hull were two obvious main stars in this phase. In addition to them I left the engine intake mesh screen frames (!) out, as well as those molded rope things. Somehow I managed to break one of them so this tank shall get along with only two.
I had decided that these pieces were clearly separate and that they'd be camo-painted separately from the rest of the tank, too. Or that's what my painter sargeant does, silence in the back!

Next to the rest of the junk you can see how the tank was earlier today. Or what you can see of it in this pic, anyway. Of course there's a bunch to be cleaned but most of the gaps in the paint cover is because my workspace is pretty badly lit and that there's no natural light to help me in the evenings. What a surprise at these latitudes in the winter. Anyway, things progress how and when they do, I'm not in a rush or anything :)

Damn, that flash makes the surfaces pretty ugly, they're a lot cooler when viewed with a plain eye and it looks a lot more like Panzergrau. Hmmmm... That doesn't sound bad, either, even though it would be completely historically unrealistic and I'm already doing something else.

But a Panzergrau King Tiger is not a bad or an ugly idea at all...

I spent a few moments last evening fooling around with those tracks, mostly I painted the "teeth" metallic and then drybrushed the wearable parts of the outsides. Perhaps I'll get carried away and muddify and dirtify them at a later point which would mean that I'd need to redo the metallification. I don't mind, if they look good to me, that's what matters.

Behind the watchful eye of the camera

After I had taken these few pictures to show you, I took it to myself to coat it all (or almost) with the Moss Green from the Lifecolor set. I got a big part done, but the rest will have to wait for the daytime during the weekend. After that I can start pondering on what kind of a camo I want to paint on it. And in the end we'll be wondering "what the hell is that and why doesn't it look like anything that I had imagined?"

But that's how it usually goes, it's a learning process and will stay that way until the very end, I imagine. I just hope that you can see some kind of improvement at some point, during these years :P