Chipping attempt

Flakiness on my tank?

I decided to give uncle Night Shift's chipping process (or a part of it) a shot in the hands of a complete fool. This plan of mine was, to let most of the tank be mostly clean and concentrate mostly on the front of the tank, especially near the mine roller. Somehow it felt like the most natural place for the worst mistreatment to happen where things would be blowing up constantly.

Attempt #1

My first attempt was dangerously based on my memory. I did a few test scratches with the lighter green I had used before, to get some of the lighter chips or scratches marked. They didn't stand out too well, so I didn't keep at it for long.

Then I mixed a bit of red (VMA 71003 Red RLM23) to the dark grey to play at the rust-protector somehow on the exposed steel. The colour itself turned out really nice-looking in my opinion, but the completely unplanned and manually made test flakes didn't really work out.

Especially here on the mine roller structure they were completely off. Luckily it was quick and easy to cover them up at this point.

On the turret's edges they looked somewhat better, but still a bit detached somehow. Maybe my effect was too subtle and didn't stand out in scale as they were.

The very same evening I rechecked the uncle's method and got a better idea for my next attempt. In short I would just need to lighten up the Russian Green and try again. Maybe I would need to airbrush the already made things out of the way.

Attempt #2 - first evening

I started all over again. First I mixed a couple of drops of lighter paint (VMA 71075 Sand(Ivory)) into a squirtful of 4BO. The paint was still a bit on the dark side after the first sponge-dabbings, so I mixed in another drop and then another drop a bit later, because the second mix still didn't stand out well enough. It was a bit surprising how light the light tone had to be to work in a way that looked good to me.

Stage one - the light chips

Against all the basic guidelines and common sense I didn't start this from the most hideable and out of the way place, but straight from the turret itself. To get my chips started I used a sponge and a 10|0 paintbrush to make dents and scratches. Sponging wasn't too good-looking in most places, so in the end I did chips just with the paintbrush.

Especially with the scratches the paintbrush was good. With the sponge I could make some random sneeze-patterns but I just felt that the brush gave me more control. Of course, I had absolutely no experience with this business so far, but I had to start somewhere.

That turret ended up looking used and mistreated. Either this got already completely out of hand, or it worked out just fine.

I had a vision of a sort about the mine roller, I just had no idea how realistic it was. The frame and the rollers needed some touching up, but I could do those separately. Because I had never seen how one of these devices looked like in real life after blowing up some anti-tank and anti-personell mines, I trusted on my gut feeling that told me those explosions would be tossing amounts of rocks, shrapnel, and whatnot.

Here I concentrated on painting mostly glancing blows -kind of strikes. At least I tried to paint some kind of radial scratches going tangentially from the pressure point.

 

On the tank's hull I thought that because of the mines blowing up constantly the front would be the most harmed area. The rest of the tank would be in a much nicer condition, of course there'd be some engine deck -themed wearing out by the edges and the hatches, and by the anchor points. The left front corner of that steel box on the fender was supposed to look like it had been dropped a few times and lazily or hastily dragged around.

I was pretty content with most of this work. To see more of the effect, I didn't want to spend all of the time available only on the light chips, and also to enjoy some variety and also to avoid going way too far in my excitement, I jumped (again) to the next stage.

Stage two - dark chips

Ok, my first attempt with the dark chips had worked decently, the red-tinted dark grey looked very fitting after the paint had dried. Trying to repeat my previous mix I added three drops of red into a squirtful of dark grey.

Like before I started with the turret. I followed the lighter marks I had made earlier, and mostly tried to fill up the larger ones with this dark grey. It was slow and delicate work. While looking at this photoset here I could notice that I hadn't gone through all the light chips that I should have.

The mine rollers got the smallest amount of my attention, because there was stuff to be fixed before these details. Here the outer left roller got a bit of a treatment, and the looked nice on it. In the photo the roller was in a silly position, which made the locking piece look like it was actually falling off.

The effects on the frame looked somehow working, at least the radial scratches had the look I was hoping to achieve. Like I said earlier, I had no idea if this was realistic or not.

During this chipping session I didn't get that far on the hull, I did some work on the front and the mudguards. Based on the photos I definitely didn't touch the cable loops, hooks, and guide bits yet.

 

Amazingly I managed to use a bit more than an hour on this session in one evening. This was very slow, but also surprisingly enjoyable stuff to work on. Even in the middle of this WIP stage the tank started looking nicely grungy.

Stage two - second evening

I checked the turret and fixed what stuck me as fixable. Maybe this was it for the turret.

The wheelery got me swearing a few times, I worked on them at a different pace than with the rest of the model, especially as on these little bits the original chips didn't show even as well as on the tank. During the evening getting darker I realized I had chosen maybe the worst workstation, the lighting conditions were a bit annoying to work on things like these.

I added a few more chips into the front of the tanks and fixed the ones that I felt incomplete from the previous evening. In this photo here I feld it was a bit too clear that I hadn't been as meticulous as I should've been while cleaning up the cable loops from mould lines.

After painting the dark chips on the bits left from the previous session, I felt that the deck and the rear hull were a bit too clean in comparison. And no, I had not forgotten that I wanted them to be cleaner than the front.

I added a few extra dents onto the engine compartment and got this mad idea to make some ringlike scratches to depict something getting stuck under the turret's lip while it rotated. Something like loose rocks or something hard and grindy.

Those two boxes in the rear edges were a bit weird, I just hadn't come up with anything for them. I also didn't want them to look either untouched or completely mistreated, so I just added a couple of horizontal scratches thinking that maybe the driver had been rotating the tank too close to trees. That trick was to be seen a few photos later, here you could see some general walked on bits and careless box-carrying -caused marks.

Around the engineering shovels I tried to make some marks that would look like whoever put the shovels in place didn't really care how they did and what sort of a ding it made inside the tank. I wasn't sure of how that came through in the end.

Overusing the same idea I tried to add a few dents by the place where the tow cable ends lied, to show that the crew just threw them around without much care.

In this set the wooden boxes looked pretty silly, but I'd get to them the next time I painted. For those I had a new set of paints from sometime last summer.