Priming and basecoating in Russia

Ideologically correct shade of primer

Fun discovery, I had some white primer in a big bottle left, and I thought I'd use that instead of fooling with the small dropper bottles. This wouldn't run out in the middle of priming.

The goo was, of course, way too old now and airbrushing it didn't work at all. Damn. After a bit of a cleanup and tossing trash out I returned to the lately often-used red primer (VSP 70624 Pure Red). Despite my concerns I didn't run out of it, I even had some left for any patching up later on. Just in the end while spraying the turret from high above the airbrush started spitting out flakes, that I had to clean up later.

Blasting the mine rollers with air and paint was interesting to say the least. They spun like windmills in an Autumn storm. Maybe I should consider gluing them together and the axle with white glue or something before doing this again with green or dark grey.

My painting environment was a bit difficult this time, I did some of my painting in a bothersome shade, against the light. Still, the photos didn't reveal anything outrageous or missed major spots. Or I wasn't looking correctly.

Zvezda paints under test

So here we were, five tiny 16ml bottles of acrylic paints from the neighbouring country. My Russian skills were just about nonexistent, I only recognized the word Stahl for steel on the cap of 08. Google's translator was a bit better:

• 20: black
• 25: wood
• 08: blue-shaded steel (gunmetal?)
• 45: khaki
• 55: camouflage (dark green
  

I know I should've recognized the last repeating word in each cap: akr/i/l/ - acryl, but I wasn't thinking so far because I didn't recognize the final character with its sound, so I just gave up before thinking of thinking. Funny thing, I with a tiny amount of headscratching I would've actually recognized a new word.

The sixth and unmarked bottle contained glue, that I didn't need. Maybe that was a good thing, as it didn't have an applicator.

Before trying it out I shook the camo green heavily and thoroughly, then added a bit to the airbrush and mixed an amount of Vallejo's acrylic thinner. TL;DR: I didn't manage to thin the paint enough, what little came out of my airbrush was too thick and then the paint got way too thin and only came out in strange bursts. I started with the turret's bottom surface, it really didn't work out at all. The colour was surprisingly dark, in my mind the Russian Green was lighter than that, but maybe different manufacturers had their own opinions on the proper shade.

After that debacle I decided to thin it for paintbrushing and then just paint it by hand for the first time on a tank in a long, long while. The tracks and rollers I was still going to airbrush dark grey, no matter what.

As you could see, the thinning operation didn't work like I wanted to, at all. I really started considering shifting to Vallejo's Russian Green over this crap.

Thanks to everyday life being very busy for a long while I didn't get to paint in ages. When I finally found some time, I decided to stop wasting time in unknowns and just use what I knew to work without a fight.

Vallejo Model Air

Unsurprisingly I was a bit displeased with my issues with the modelmaker's own paints. But what could you do when your skills weren't enough to accommodate? Change the solution instead of swearing about it. Using the trial-error method the Zvezda's Green n°55 would've run out way before the painting was done and what would I have done then? Used Vallejo's paints, because those I had.

I blasted the tank with the Russian Green (VMA 71017), and the antenna and the mine rollers with Panzer Dark Grey (VMA 71056). For a bit of a variety in the shading I applied a bit of a lighter green (VMA 71022 Light Green RLM82) from a zenithal direction. The contrast between the paints was small so it didn't show up strongly.

While painting the mine rollers the green on the support structure suffered a bit but that wasn't a problem.

Below: a set of photos after the first new airbrushing session. There was a bit of red showing here and there, somewhere the dark grey had gone over the green. Most of the red wasn't harmful because the green paint may have been chipped off. The rest was heading toward a muddy future, so having a bit of the rust protecting layer showing wasn't a bad thing.

My gap-filling skills were clearly worse than useless, as you could tell from this photo. Like I was pondering earlier, the back end was going to be pretty muddy-gooey, because I had to hide my crimes.

Painting the turret didn't make me feel sad, of course it was a bit clean as it was. I was thinking of trying something new again, as soon as I could carve some (=lots of) time and references for it first.

The tracks got a predicted dark grey basecoat for the rust-mud-graphite weathering. All the wheels got painted green, and if there was some rust-protector red inside, it was fine here as well.

Maybe this was most of it now. Once again this postful of action had eaten a mindnumbing amount of time in the calendar, even though it was less than 45mins of airbrushing in total. Especially painting the tracks showed me that it was good that I had started wearing nitrile gloves while airbrushing, because otherwise my left hand would've been almost completely green-grey and that wasn't good for the skin. Ah, getting older, what a fantastic thing it was!