Grabbing a paintbrush and brushing around
After the basic paintjob the model was practically a large lump of yellowishness and I was to move forward from that. The roundels and other right-angular markings were to be done now so I didn't forget them. With the metallics I was going to stay on my current course and paint them dark grey. The few wooden parts were a large question mark but I expected them to end up being tolerable after a few steps.
Palms first
From my stencils even the smallest DAK palm tree didn't fit into the middle of the turret the way the instructions suggested. Instead I said screw it and moved the veggies into the front corners.
On the right edge the tree worked well. To compensate the left edge's plant flowed over badly, I hadn't paid enough attention on the tight fit of the stencil. So, repainting coming up.
These were only placed on the turret. That was a good thing, as there wasn't that much space on the tank after all. On the second painting round the left edge's tiny nazi tree settled nicely, even better than its friend.
The Balkenkreuz, part 1
The count of Wehrmacht's Balkenkreuz was three: to the front side edges of the hull and one in the rear plate.
A pattern was emerging: my stencils weren't pressed tightly enough against the model's surface, only the butt-end's marking was successful on the first attempt. The right edge's version wasn't pretty but might be acceptable when the black inner cross was painted in.
The funniest thing was that when I finally got to paint the black crosses, the side marking got clearly improved but the rear one was totally ruined (there was no space for the alignment piece, and I didn't paint them even during the same week) and I had to cover it up with sandy yellow.
Return rollers and road wheels
While waiting for my white markings to dry I thought that the rubbery colour (VMA 71315 Tire Black) was maybe a self-explanatory paint for the softer parts of the various wheels. I started with the outer roadwheels, then iterated through the return rollers, and returned to paint the inner roadwheels. My mistake was to use a slightly suboptimal paintbrush with the spock-shape that produced a couple of annoying misstrokes that had to be fixed. Sigh. One day I'd learn.
Fixing the tire black wasn't a big operation. My return rollers had a couple of underpainted bits so they needed to be completed.
Tools and other unpainted metal things
Now I started painting the unpainted metallic items with Dark Grey RLM66, starting from the radio guy's machine gun and the various tools on that corner like the axe, startup crank and the whatever iron lived between them.
The right side also had the radio antenna, of which I only painted the hinge, as I wanted to avoid making a mess. I also wasn't entirely sure of its colour so I didn't want to guess wrong and decided to doublecheck from ddg instead. Located below the antenna's resting place there was a wrench of some sort that most likely doubled as a melee weapon.
In the rear end I painted the first layer of the exhaust pipe/drum.
Still using my spock-y brush I continued to the left side. During this session I only got to paint some of the topmost S-hook, a wrench, part of a crowbar and the other long wrench along with the wire cutter's bare metal parts. Each of those still needed work on them, just like I needed to think of what kind of a jack block I wanted to attempt to paint this time. The fire extinguisher I knew to leave basecoated.
For better accuracy in painting the tiny bits the next day I switched to a smaller paintbrush and kept on tinkering. I still hadn't even thought about the wood colour yet, and therefore not even started painting any of it. This time I thought I'd use the same setup for each of them. Then I had to paint the wire cutter's handles reddish and the bakelite caps with a different dark grey.
While going through the bare steel I also painted the leaf springs of the bogies. Most likely none of this would be visible later on, but at least they were done.
Wooden things
Yeah, the wooden things have been among the most challenging parts. I took out the AK's warm wood shades box again and thought I'd follow the barrel example with three colours: the darkest (AK11108 Hull Red) for the woodgrain, the middle tone (AK11351 Wood Base) as the self-declared base colour and the lightest (AK11115 Light Earth) for highlights.
I started by painting the jack block's wood parts, then the handles of the axe and the shovel, and while I was aware of things, also the pipe cleaner's wooden multipart rod's wooden parts. While playing with these wood colours I chose the reddest of them (AK11106 Mahogany) for the wire cutter's handles, it was red enough to act as the handle's base colour.
After allowing for the paint to cure I then painted the base colour on all of the woods. I tried to leave some darkness showing through, but as always, at this stage the results were suspicious. Again while watching the paint dry I fixed or improved some of the bare metals, like the axe's blade. I also painted the jack block's metal structs and the pipe cleaner's brass bits which I wasn't going to paint with a brass paint this time around.
As I was working with the metallic parts I also checked if any of the periscopes were visible. Unlike on a Jagdpanzer IV there weren't many here so I just painted the driver's scope dark grey. The radio operator's machine gun was a bit too mild-looking so I mixed some tire black into the RLM66 to get a bit darker dark grey and used that.
Then I did some highlights with the lightest of my lightest wood paint on the wood parts. Maybe they ought to get another layer of the darkest one before a wash. Hm.
While pondering on that I spent a moment to paint the barrel cleaner's protective bag/sack with a dark green (VMA 71019 Camouflage Dark Green) to make it stand out a bit from all the other dark grey. That might require another layer or perhaps drybrushing with a gently toned-up paint.
My fire extinguisher looked a bit boring being completely sandy yellow, but I thought that had I painted that, too, with dark grey, it'd been like another of those tools (based on my ddg'ing and reading these things were either the hull colour or dark grey). This was a correct approach, but just so boring to paint :D
To take the brightness of the wooden parts down a bit I did apply a new layer of the darkest paint to play the part of the woodgrain like I was pondering a bit earlier. This seemed to be a tolerable trick, now the light parts didn't jump out as badly. The wire cutter's bakelite caps I painted with tire black, it was different enough from the rest of the dark grey.
Changing my mind about the turret internals
My evening painting session was otherwise done but I still had a couple of minutes to waste, so I poked into the turret after all. Of the three periscopes I painted a part with dark grey. Then I painted the breech block's opening/closing lever to make it stand out better. The breech block itself I painted steel (VMA 71065 Steel). Still, none of this was ever to be seen, so this was just me taking more steps into the completionist's madness.
Balkenkreuz, part 2
For a short moment I wrestled between my laziness and my goals. I liked the idea of slapping a Balkenkreuz into the back of the vehicle, especially as it was dropped from the left side due to space issues.
Most of the time went into searching for the edge marker's place, because I couldn't do this so that I'd started with that and then set the centerpoint of the cross. Instead I aligned the edge marker by the outer cross' stencil (white) and then taped the stencil paranoidly tightly and applied the (awful) painter's tape all around. I needed less than one drop of white paint, and I thought it dried in place even without the air blasting I did.
Right away I swapped the center (black) cross stencil in place and as madly as before, and again one drop of paint was much more than what I needed. Now it looked good.
Who would've thought that when this got done calmly and carefully in one go without issues (and still quickly), I saved more time than rushing and fixing repeatedly?
Dry fitting
Now this model was in a stage that the weathering was the next larger step, and to aid that I thought I'd apply gloss varnish over the whole damn thing. I also needed to think about weathering in advance, because I wanted to get a hold of the Panzerwanne's sides without issues, so I had to leave the tracks and related bits still off the tank.
This stage of the project was finished by blasting a layer of Vallejo's Gloss Varnish (70510) all around the turret, hull, roadwheels (which stayed nicely kept in place in my masking tape setup). Using the gloss varnish was to help with the oil washing that was coming up next, if my glossy layer was decent.
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