Finished: Project VII/15

Challenger II MBT

The tracked pride of the Brits ended up with a peculiar camo pattern. I'd say that the painting broke its form pretty effectively and it might actually work nicely in an autumny maple-heavy forest. Or in a corner of a city that's a spray-painter favourite. Still, I didn't go out with the model to take some example photos, even though maybe I should have. Well, too late for that now, can't help it anymore.

The most important thing was that my Project Assistant had clearly a lot of fun, that she was happy and even proud of what she had done. Oh, and that she got to do something for real and with a permission.

In any case: she's not going to paint a thing with my airbrush (or try it out alone) in a looooong time still. Maybe.

An explosion of colours

The starting point

To replace the previously failed photos I took a new one where one could see the top sides of the tank, all clearly and neatly primed. Everything looked good and well-covered, so I didn't have to patch anything up, causing new delays or problems.

Paint paint paint

On one early evening the eager painter was released on her model. Very surprisingly she chose blue as her first paint, instead of her favourite, Orange.

As a fascinating detail she was pretty careful while painting, instead of just swishing around with the paintbrush. She also held the model very nicely, instead of the full-hand grab that we had been somehow expecting. Perhaps all the watching over me had given ideas or the explanation is somewhere else. Still, it was plenty of fun to watch :)

After one session a decent amount of untouched grey was still visible. Considering its painted parts the tank looked like either a paintball target, a piece of urban art or something you'd see in a neon-camouflaged fighting unit in Seoul or Tokyo - completely without all the scifi associations, though. Or it just looks like someone's first ever Warhammer 40,000 vehicle :P

Painting, round 2

After a number of evenings my Project Assistant wanted to get back to painting her tank. The table was double-covered quickly and the beast was released on her model.

Her painting process was very careful and it looked like she was paying quite a bit of attention to it, surprisingly much. Especially the carefulness surprised us. When something like twenty minutes of work had elapsed she declared that "This is now ready!". Good, now it was good and done. I asked if she wanted decals on her tank and such, just like daddy's models. Her response was an immediate "yes!" - I was very pleased with that.

Imageless wrap-up

I spent a brief moment on two afternoons to first apply a gloss varnish all the places that were going to get a decal on them. On the second one I asked "which of these options would you prefer?" and did as requested. I did try to explain what the point was and why did I do things the way I did with the decals, but it didn't seem to be that interesting at this point. No surprises there.

So I put on a handful of numbers 32 and greater than signs, whose excuse I've never cared about enough to actually google it. These ended up in the sides of the turret and the skirts. On top of the gun's barrel, in the front face of the laser box I put a flame sign, whatever its point was. There were a bunch of other decals on the small sheet, such as stripes and slightly different greater than signs, but as none of them were declared on the instructions, I threw them away.

To finish the model up and protect it a bit from the expected playing around with, I applied a healthy layer of matt varnish all around. At this point I didn't take any photos, but left the model curing in peace over the night.

Project VII/15

My Project Assistant's own model

During this year while I've been building and painting I've heard the words "daddy, I want to paint as well" next to me every once in a while. For most of the time it was enough that I gave some random pieces and let her paint those tail fins and tank leftovers with colours she wanted to use. Mostly they were red and chocolate brown.

For some reason the random pieces got boring - or because I was working on full models and not on random pieces myself. I then promised that I'd build her a model of her own that she could paint all by herself. My suggestion was received with the greatest happiness.

The moment of choice-making

I asked, what kind of a model would she like to get. "I want a tank!" Ok, an old or a new type? "New!" Good, and from which country? I think we could get a tank made by the Americans, Germans, Russians, French or English. "Finnish! English!" I'll go and check tomorrow, is that ok? "YEEEES!"

After a short rummaging through the shelves at Hobby Point I bought the only modern British tank. APCs and other nonsense I didn't even consider.

A jubilant unboxing

It was really fun to observe how happy a little kid got thanks to something as weird as this. I started building the tank right away and emphasized that it couldn't be painted yet. First it had to be built and then primed, so that the proper paints would stick to the surface.

Built in an hour

I took the building process as seriously as if it was for myself. I cut the pieces off and cleaned them as I always do. Just out of principle.

The first step was the rear armor with all the weird junk and those stupefying fuel drums on the back. After that was done I prepared the drive sprockets, road and idler wheels and installed the return rollers before gluing on the rest of the wheels.

The despicable liquorice carpet -style tracks pretended to be cooperative but then one of them got broken unrepairably in the middle of everything. I decided to fix it with a couple of strips of tape and then positioned the track so that the mengelefied part would be completely obscured by the tank's shapes and parts.

I actually should've used pliers to make installing all those cylinders, handles and rear view mirrors somewhat easier. But as I was as lazy as I am, I didn't bother searching for my pliers and instead got glue on my fingertips.

When my first half-hour was finished, I had most of the tank already built. The turret was just missing a few cones and the body was missing its skirts. In my delusions of grandeur I had thought I'd get this built in a single sitting but I started so late that I didn't quite make it.

During the next afternoon I glued on the last of the pieces. Now there were so many so tiny pieces that fighting them actually took as much time as everything I had done the previous day!

As soon as I had the construction phase completed I primed the whole model all around with Vallejo's grey surface primer. Of course I took a couple of photos of it but when checking them later nothing could be seen well. The lighting conditions had been abysmal.

The colour scheme

Of course I asked my project assistant, which colours she'd want to use to paint her tank. To put some sort of a limit I said that she could use four colours.

"Orange! Red. And blue. And green!" Oh yes, this'd be an artistic tank. On a Wednesday I grabbed her with me and we went to the Hobby Point to pick up some paints.

These are the paints she chose from left to right: UK Mediterranean Blue; Ferrari Red; Orange Fire; Green Zinc Chromate. I thought I'd need to guide the painting process a bit so that the individual colours could actually be seen on the model, instead of a disgusting mix of all of them. But we'll see what happens, when we get to let her grab a hold of the paintbrush.