An explosion of colours

The starting point

To replace the previously failed photos I took a new one where one could see the top sides of the tank, all clearly and neatly primed. Everything looked good and well-covered, so I didn't have to patch anything up, causing new delays or problems.

Paint paint paint

On one early evening the eager painter was released on her model. Very surprisingly she chose blue as her first paint, instead of her favourite, Orange.

As a fascinating detail she was pretty careful while painting, instead of just swishing around with the paintbrush. She also held the model very nicely, instead of the full-hand grab that we had been somehow expecting. Perhaps all the watching over me had given ideas or the explanation is somewhere else. Still, it was plenty of fun to watch :)

After one session a decent amount of untouched grey was still visible. Considering its painted parts the tank looked like either a paintball target, a piece of urban art or something you'd see in a neon-camouflaged fighting unit in Seoul or Tokyo - completely without all the scifi associations, though. Or it just looks like someone's first ever Warhammer 40,000 vehicle :P

Painting, round 2

After a number of evenings my Project Assistant wanted to get back to painting her tank. The table was double-covered quickly and the beast was released on her model.

Her painting process was very careful and it looked like she was paying quite a bit of attention to it, surprisingly much. Especially the carefulness surprised us. When something like twenty minutes of work had elapsed she declared that "This is now ready!". Good, now it was good and done. I asked if she wanted decals on her tank and such, just like daddy's models. Her response was an immediate "yes!" - I was very pleased with that.

Imageless wrap-up

I spent a brief moment on two afternoons to first apply a gloss varnish all the places that were going to get a decal on them. On the second one I asked "which of these options would you prefer?" and did as requested. I did try to explain what the point was and why did I do things the way I did with the decals, but it didn't seem to be that interesting at this point. No surprises there.

So I put on a handful of numbers 32 and greater than signs, whose excuse I've never cared about enough to actually google it. These ended up in the sides of the turret and the skirts. On top of the gun's barrel, in the front face of the laser box I put a flame sign, whatever its point was. There were a bunch of other decals on the small sheet, such as stripes and slightly different greater than signs, but as none of them were declared on the instructions, I threw them away.

To finish the model up and protect it a bit from the expected playing around with, I applied a healthy layer of matt varnish all around. At this point I didn't take any photos, but left the model curing in peace over the night.