StuG III Ausf. G weathering and finishing touches

The final megastage

Starting this phase I thought that it would be just about finished, maybe after an evening or two before the StuG would be ready to be photographed. *beeeeeeeeeeep* said the siren, to emphasize my mistake.

Boltheads and other edges to be highlighted

I iterated through all the main colours with their own highlight colours. On the sandy yellows I used the plain sandy yellow straight from the tub, without any mixing. It stood out nicely as the oil washes had darked the light colour the most.

For the RLM82 greens I made a slightly lighter tone by mixing in some light green (VMC 70942) and applied that mostly on the edges, some central bits of plates and what felt like a good place.

The brown highlighter I made out of a mix of two Panzer Aces set's camo paints in about 90/10 ratio of 70826 and 70825 (German Camo Medium Brown and German Camo Pale Brown, respectively).

I guess I could've treated them a bit differently if I had a better clue of how StuGs lived in general.

Chipping some paint

For the lighter chips I really didn't feel like mixing three different very light shades, and to try to align them perfectly on the camo pattern. Instead I chose a slightly more dramatic approach: White Grey (VMA 71119). The edges and such were easy targets, my biggest question marks came from me not having a good idea on how the flatter surfaces got worn down and kicked in real life for plausible scuffmarkings. I did add a few scratches and other dents and tapdancing results, but tried to keep it pretty simple this time around.

 

Like before, I filled the light chips with a mix of black grey (VMA 71056) and red (VMA 71003 Red RLM23).

Weld line pondering

Inspired by uncle NightShift I thought of painting any weld lines with steel or even silver. At this point, especially after the oil washes, it would've looked a bit off in my opinion so I skipped it. But I did consider it anyway.

Nasty washes

Thanks to the nonsense with the varnishes I still had some glossy parts shining under light, so I thought I'd attack those with some really thin dirt wash. To be more exact I mixed two dirty washes and spread them over two evenings. The first one was approriately just dirt (VMA 71133 Dirt) that I used to cover most of the vehicle. This may have been closer to a filter than a wash, it was that thin, but what did I know anyway? The next evening I thinned down some brown (VMC 70872 Chocolate Brown) and concentrated in much smaller surfaces than with the dirt earlier.

In general I felt the assault gun looked nastier than a few steps earlier. That was the goal, in addition to covering up the stubborn gloss varnish traces.

Periscopes and their glasses

This unit had a selection of nicely visible periscopes of a couple of different types. The driver's periscope was of course in the worst spot to paint, then there was a very normal-looking periscope and then a binocular periscope and they were neat. Somehow I had completely ignored the commander's cupola's periscopes until now. To start the show I painted each of them black (VMA 71047) and built on that.

Of the actual colour of the prisms I had this idea that they were green-tinted. Of course I could remember wrong, but it was of no concern as I wasn't going for a realistic look. Instead I decided to paint them with a blue jeweling that'd stand out clearly. That meant that over the black I painted a layer of UK Mediterranean Blue (VMA 71111).

The next layer I painted with the Magic Blue (VGA 72721) I used a lot in the BT minis, going for smaller crescent or L-shaped shapes. In the tiny round ones it was of course a bit more difficult than on the rectangles.

 

To make them stand out even more, and to throw seriousness under the muddy tracks, I added the light reflection dots and lines into the corners. They stood out very nicely, especially from lower angles, but from normal viewpoints they didn't really stand out.

Finally I coated them with gloss varnish. They were in the end quite different from the ones I painted with greys on the Jagdpanzer IV some three years ago.

Graphite

I treated the wearable parts of the tracks with my graphite pen. As usual, I did this gently and only treated those bits of the tracks that were visible. In an attempt to reduce the amount of mess and dirtiness I left the parts that it rested on untouched.

Tamiya pigments

My storage had two boxes of Tamiya Weathering Master A that contained Light Sand, Sand, and Mud pigments. One of them had a still functional brush-sponge tool, the other one's sponge had crumbled apart years ago. On the spot I decided to use them all in order from lightest to darkest, a bit like I used the dirty washes earlier.

Light sand

Pretty much the whole Assault Gun got brushed around with the light sand pigment.

Sand

The normal sand got applied a bit more concentrated on the centers of the panels and some sandtrap-like corners. My idea here was that the lighter sand dusted more, covering more surface area, and than the wetter, heavier one spread around a bit less.

Mud

The mud pigment was applied with the sponge and I concentrated mostly on the lower hull and the wheels with it.

 

Final tweaks with oils  

While playing with the oils earlier I had successfully ignored the exhaust pipes completely, and I had to do that still to be able to rest. Now that I had the nasty oils ready, I used that stuff on the track armour pieces behind the casemate. Those had remained too clean, and it was not acceptable.

Both the dark and light rust (ABT070 Dark Rust, ABT060 Light Rust) were thinned down with my worrisomely low-running odourless thinner. In the end I used the dark rust also on just about each of my paint chips to give them a bit more life. The light rust I used quite sparingly anywhere outside the exhausts and track armour.

To be honest, I wasn't supremely happy with all of these, but I also recognized that I had been staring at the model for ages and in so many sessions (22 by the photo naming but I had worked on more evenings than that). Perhaps I was being overcritical.

StuG III Ausf. G oils

An oily life

Fooling with the oil paints required patience, as they took more time to dry than the acrylics. Then again, I really enjoyed playing with them for some reason. My idea this time was to get something from my oil sets to bring more peace to the somewhat striking camo pattern I had painted.

Dot filtering

I got inspired to try out the dot filtering again, now I used three colours in two different ways. As the colours I used a yellowish one (ABT155 Light Sand), an olive green (ABT050), and ocher (ABT092). Somehow I didn't think of taking any photos of the work in progress, my apologies.

As the name suggested, I started with dots that I then blended around the hull using a thinner-damped paintbrush. Then I remembered Bob Ross' wet on wet technique, and a few "this can be done too" videos. To try that out I painted some plain thinner on some flat panels, and then dotted my oil dots on that, and blended over the wetness. This felt like an easier method. The only bigger problem on this model was the Schürzen racks that made the side armour a bit more difficult to get to.

After curing overnight the difference between that and the earlier was not huge. Next time I'd start with the sepia wash, to get the nooks and crannies jumping out better.

Glossing over

Because the Vallejo varnish wasn't stuff that wanted to go through the airbrush out of the bottle, I applied the gloss varnish with a paintbrush instead. I'd really preferred airbrushing, but I didn't want to get it stuck or waste ages with thinning ratios. Sounded like an upcoming order of something from someplace.

The pin washing with cleanup

In my excitement I didn't stop taking photos of the washing round, or its cleanup part, nor the post-curing staet. My time was limited and I prioritized the progress instead. As if taking a couple of silly photos was going to take a long time.

Again, I iterated the boltheads, panel lines, edges and shadows with a very thing Abteilung's Sepia (ABT002). After half an hour of curing time I cleaned up the biggest messes and blended them this and that way to get some variety on my surfaces and increase the general dirtiness. When that was done, I left the model inside its box in the sauna for two days to dry up. 

Dull coating

I brushed the matt varnish (AK Ultra Matt Varnish) in two sessions. Like the top view showed, it simply didn't stick everywhere. It was the same thing I grumbled about when varnishing CFJ Quatrefoil some time ago. Perhaps it was time for me to order some airbrushable varnishes, so I could stop using excessive amounts of time on this sort of work.

I didn't feel like using a third evening on the matt varnish, so maybe the next step was going to be returning some of the highlights toned down by the oils, and maybe some thin sandy or dusty layer getting applied all over the TD. Yes, that was exactly what we were going to do. Until next time, then!

StuG III Ausf. G tracks

Panzer III/IV type 6B w/cleats

I ordered two identical sets of tracks, even though I considered getting the Winterketten for one of the targets. There'd be time for those later on, now I simply didn't feel it.

Track assembly

Based on my eyeballed measures I decided that about 28cm per side was a good first goal for the track lenght, and then continue from that a link or a couple at a time until reaching the proper lenght. Because of this I did not glue the wheelsets into the StuG, as that made playing with the tracks so much easier. The guesstimated 28cm was three roadwheelfuls too short, as the photo showed, so I assembled more until I did get the ends joined. The actual lenght was ~33cm which gave me some looseness for a bit of sag.

With the tracks built to a good length and repeatedly dry-fitted, A/B pins correctly aligned and the first-buit track marked on the right (the left side when facing forward) side, I could paint them. In addition to the driving tracks I built two short bits of track armour to be hanged on the back wall of the casemate.

Track painting

To keep the tracks somehow in control while painting them I simply laid a decent length of painter's tape with the glue side up, and taped that from the ends onto the instructions. It was going to hold the tracks nicely enough for some airbrushing.

I started, somewhat obviously, with thin layers of Vallejo's black primer. While working on them I took a number of WIP photos but maybe one here was going to be sufficient: 

Over the black I airbrushed some black grey (VMA 71056 Black Grey) to act as the bare steel, in somewhat nebulous pattern. In my mind that gave these tracks a bit of a surface texture.

This time I really had to remember that also the closing pins needed to be painted so they wouldn't stand out in their greyness from the finished model. I kept repeating this to myself constantly, because I knew my weaknesses or at least a couple of them.

Dirt foundation

Weathering the tracks got started with a really thinned down brown (VMC 70826 German Camo Medium Brown) to get some kind of a long-lived earth and dirtiness over the steel tracks. As a colour I believed Chocolate Brown would've worked even better but I also thought this sort of a brown was going to work nicely as well. Later on I could and would add darker brown for fresh, wet mud/earth.

I wasn't going to go far with the weathering while the tracks were laid open, because weathering needed to be done when the build was done and the aforementioned last pins were also painted and not shining like a kilo of radium in the night. These two track armour pieces didn't of course take the same kind of weathering that the running tracks did, but I started the same way anyway.

Gunmetal for the polished inner parts

I started by thinning down gunmetal (VMA 71072 Gunmetal) mostly because I knew my paint to be a few years old, and also the thinner paint wasn't going to be a bad idea. Those guiding teeth were a handy detail to start with, so I didn't test anything on the most visible details.

After the teeth were done I checked with a road wheel what part of the inner track was going to be ground clean while driving. Just about the full flat surface, just as one could've expected. 

With that checked I painted the metal band with the thinned-down paint, applying a cautious layer. Of course I hadn't really seen a running tank close by in almost 25 years and even then I didn't pay attention to those parts, so the realism or believability of this approach was based on assumptions. I thought this'd look better than the pure steel bands I painted some years ago on the German-captured IS-2.

Earthy tones

After that was done I closed up the tracks and painted the pins with black grey right away. Then I drybrushed the outer and side edges and that was simple enough with the loops. Before I was going to install the tracks on the assault gun, I painted a layer of heavily thinned down dirty brown (VMA 71133 Dirt).

Track attachment

Installing the tracks was pretty simple this time, thanks to me not gluing the return rollers or any others yet. My track had more lenght than I thought it did, these photos showed all the looseness hanging below the road wheels due to the installation order. I left the wheels and their glue to flash, I didn't want to accidentally plop anything out while readjusting the tracks.

 

The next evening I glued the road wheels onto the tracks to secure the sag in the correct part, so it hung from the return rollers. If something started bothering me, I could still readjust later.

This was enough of track play for the time being. Making them messier was going to happen when the rest of the vehicle was getting weathered.