Soviet-style priming

The great mass

At long last I got to dig out my airbrush and my low-running grey primer (VSP Grey Primer). I started the priming process from the bottom of the turret, then proceeded to the upper hull and from there to the lower one. This way the turret's bottom and the upper hull's turret ring had the time to dry so that I could put the turret in its place and then paint the rest of it easily. Maybe it sounds silly but this has been the quickest and most fingerprintless method of priming the whole model.

Of course I was prepared to touch up some places, most likely the road wheels / suspension system part. But that was something I'd see properly the next day.

Tracking, tracking, tracking

Naturally I primed the tracks as well, both on the inside and the outside. Following the idea I mentioned in the previous post I blasted the inner surface of the tracks with steel coloured paint (VMA 71065 Steel), aiming from left and right to get proper coverage.

The idea of this trick was that as the metallic road wheels were grinding the track links constantly, on the same position. For the next step I cut some long, thinnish strips of masking tape, approximating the width of the road wheels. Then I laid them on both sides of the teeth, just where the road wheels were touching. As the base colour of the tracks I chose a darkish brown.

The brown I painted in a few steps, first I just brushed on some Tamiya's paint (XF-10 Flat Brown) pretty liberally and later I airbrushed with better coverage some gently lighter brown (VMA 00000 Brown). Because the outer surface of the tracks was damn annoying to even think of painting by brush, I didn't consider that option but airbrushed the buggers happily and quickly.

While removing the masking tape strips I saw, as pretty much expected, that the result wasn't optimal. A while later I touched the metallic surfaces by brush. Again after a day of letting the paint dry, among other things, I applied a brown wash on the inner surfaces (VMA 71136 IJA Earth Brown).