Jagdpanzering 27

Weathering session 2

I had two kinds of pigments in my collection. One of the types were those Tamiya boxes with three pigment "tablets" in their lockers, and a two-headed brush/sponge applicator. They looked a bit like makeup things. The rest of my pigments have lived as powders in their own bottles.

With my limited use I had never come up with a good method for the pill-style ones, I mostly dipped the applicator's sponge into the binder, rubbed that on the pill, and then poked that onto the model. The powders I applied either the same way or just took some on the dry brush part, and spread the pigments around the model, and finally sprayed the binder with my airbrush while hoping I wouldn't be blowing away all the pigments.

So nothing exciting or really well functioning, in short. On a random youtube channel I saw a clip where the guy was, after the oil washes, using the pigments like paint: mixing them with his thinner. I pondered this out loud at my workplace's miniature-painting channel and I was quickly told that the Abteilung thinner worked just fine with them, so I initialized a test.

From my small collection of pigment bottles I picked a few to try: Fresh Rust (Vallejo Pigments 73118), Dark Steel (AK Interactive / Pigments), Track Rust (AK Interactive / Pigments), and Carbon Black (Vallejo Pigments 73116). I measured some of the stuff, going from left to right, some steel, fresh rust and black. At the last moment I dropped off the track rust, as I thought I had fooled with the tracks enough already.

Then I applied a couple of drops of thinner with my pipette into the powder. Before applying I mixed them a bit into a thin wash, so that I'd have something else than weird lumps to smash onto my tank.

 

I didn't take WIP photos with the pigments, I just poked around a product at a time and took the photos afterwards. I started with the carbon black that I applied onto the gun barrel's end and to the exhaust pipe.

In my own opinion I had used the rust pretty carefully and in small amounts on tactical spots. My first target was the track in the end of the tank, the piece that I wanted to get to look a bit less uniform. I applied the goo here and there, concentrating on parts where standing rain water would pool in, but not all the same everywhere.

I also applied some rusty goo to the upper area of the muffler, and later on I blended the mix around a bit. Onto the rear deck I dropped a few select spots of rust, such as on the jack, and a few hinges (one visible part in the photo below was between the wire cutters and the spare roadwheel space). The mudguards by the engine's vents also looked like a fruitful surface for standing water and therefore rust, so I did some poking there as well.

On the running gear I mostly played with the dark steel, I applied it pretty happily onto the track guiding horns, the teeth of the drive sprockets and the contact surface of the idlers, and onto the grippy bits of the track links on the flipside.

 

Over a dozen hours later

I took a couple of checkup photos the next afternoon to see what had I done. Especially the first photo showed how the result was stronger than anticipated on the base of the lamp.

These ones here behaved much more like I had hoped,  maybe someone could complain why the intact paintjob has gotten rusty. That was obviously the result of me not thinking that much ahead.

Vallejo's light rust was quite bright, so I concluded that I should've applied it more lightly - or maybe I could've mixed it with AK's track rust to get a bit darker result.

These individual-link tracks were horrendous and here you could see that another connection had opened with time (and manipulation demanded by the painting process).

The metal pigment could be spied on the horns and teeth, but I was wondering if I had gone a bit overboard? Of course I could always blend it away a bit with some thinner, especially here the last photo showed how the drive sprocket was half-coated in steely dust. On the tracks it looked great, though.