Hummel weathering and final detailing

Final quick things TM

Camo painted, all subassemblies done, the crew reassigned past the Eastern Front. All that was left now was the most fun tweaking, fine-tuning and nitpicking. And making a mess, of course. How long could that take, a couple of silly hours?

First rusts and getting fancy with wood

Weathering got started with rust oils being slathered over the track armour and the exhaust pipes. I did these things before I painted the numerous dots on my Hinterhalt-Tarnung but collected the photos and yapping into a more thematically accurate post. These all used Light Rust (ABT060), the exhaust pipes because they were constantly hot and the track armour was a new chunk that had been very recently driven on. Or that's what I thought and implemented based on this mental nonsense.

For the various wooden pieces I made again some brown wash (aptly named ABT080 Brown Wash). After the application my favourite piece, for once, was the jack block that ended up looking great. The jack's wooden handle was an important detail, in my opinion.

Of course all the wooden things benefited from the wash, in this photo the crates and the plank setup were still damp and looked much better after drying. Somehow the shovel handles didn't get as much of an improvement in visuals, perhaps it was because of the missing or simply bad woodgrain texture/effect.

Before I started applying the oils I had glued in the machine gun and the rammer, so I wouldn't snap them off at a horrendous moment. That rammer was the weirdest of the wooden tools, I had not seen a real German version so I didn't have any actual knowledge. My memories from quarter a century ago of a Soviet rammer even had, maybe they were painted green? Without any better information I made it as a wooden stick, anyone with facts is welcome to comment.

While I still had leftover brown wash left, I thought I could start on ruining the compartment's floor. This was a general messiness layer, I was going to go through the tinier details with Sepia a bit later.

Howitzer installation

Now I installed the gun in its place. Visual progress was glorious.

When the glue was cured long enough I started diluting some darker brown wash (ABT002 Sepia), messing up first the boxes and crates with their lines and crevices, the flooring and general corners and the gun overall. The outside I ignored pretty much completely to avoid finger messes, the only outer surfaces I poked were the sides of the Panzerwanne and the bogies. Without the tracks they were accessible so this was a good moment for them to get treated to some nastiness.

Caterpillaring

Some days later I installed the road wheels in place, and the tracks one by one. Next I inserted the drive sprockets to the front, and aligned the teeth with the track links and after letting the glue set a bit, I looped the opposite end of the track around the idler wheel and pressed it in place. On both tracks at this point I heard a tiny snap and as the first photo showed, the overeagerly painted tracks had lost a tactical amount of flexibility and I had an accident in my hands.

The situation looked worse in the photo than what the reality was. As the tracks were of the correct legnth, I could get them glued together again. I decided to simplify this a bit by gluing the return rollers in their spots and then glued the tracks onto the road wheels to avoid too much free movements when closing the tracks again. That was my plan, at least. While the gluings were setting I installed the shovels into the rear ends so things could progress while others took a step back.

When my fixings were curing I washed the wheelsets with my Sepia wash, and after another curing break I wiped excesses away. The next evening I glued the track ends together on both sides, and on the left side I decided to add one spare link just to be safe. I still needed to paint it, of course.

Staring this close the patchwork stabbed my poor eyes, but I could not notice from a bit further away. Maybe I could mask it a bit with some mud paste when I got that far.

Drybrushing

Once again I considered for a fleeting moment if I should drybrush all the corners and edges with their own camo pattern -dictated colours. That moment of madness didn't last long and I used Ivory instead (VMA 71075). Yup, it was easier for my eyes to catch a hold of the edges and bolts this way. Then I glued the planks onto the rearmost boxes even if I wasn't using the little guys at all. Maybe I could glue a shell or three there, if the inspiration struck that way.

'Tis but a scratch

Regarding the chippig I leaned to gentle wear as opposed to sandblasting. Looking at the model I was thinking if the travel locks could leave a stronger mark onto the barrel, in addition to that I would probably just go for the edges and such that I could think people to be crossing a lot, or hanging from. Anything else would be in the combat compartment, after silly artillerymen dropped their shells on the floor fuzes first, and whatever they did when no one was watching.

I gave a quick shot at a lightened RAL-green for some chip base, but that was going to be too tedious and I just switched my approach. I painted the hopefully random scratches and lines with a slightly lighter sandy yellow. As always, I  then filled the larger ones with black grey that had a drop of red mixed in. Doing that was too exciting and I forgot to take any detail photos.

More oil

To make my mistreated paintjob a bit more lively I made washes of Abteilung's Light and Dark rusts (ABT060 and ABT070 respectively).

The brigher and fresher rust I stippled into the chips. After a bit of setting time I blended them into their surroundings.

The darker rust I used on a few places, mostly to the hooks on top of the armour panels, on mirrored sides of the vehicle. I applied some rust, and then pulled them down toward the ground.

While I was happily doing all this I also made a thin mix of Dark Mud (ABT130) for the lower hull and wherever I thought muddy crap would fly when you drove a thing like this outside.

Ultra matt coat

I was under no impression of getting this out of my airbrush so I brushed AK's Ultra Matt Varnish on the model by a paintbrush.

The actual last things

My ultimate task was sponge-applying some Tamiya's Weathering Master pigments. I used mostly Mud and a small amount of Light Sand. The sandy one I used mostly to further highlight some upper surfaces, edges and bolts on the superstructure. At this point I remembered to fix the aiming stakes' reds and whites, and the completely ignored convoy trail light in the bottom left back corner. For its base I painted it off-white, and when it was cured I used some Citadel's Green Wash I had bought either in late 1996 or early 1997. That stuff was still valid.

When I couldn't imagine spinning the Hummel in my hands much anymore, I got to the graphite pen and used it mostly on the tracks, a bit on the shovels, jack block's metal thingies, jack's ends, and a bit on the tow cable. With this amount of time spent I felt the Hummel was just about finished.

Hummel's crew journey

Three artillerymen

Without further fanfares I built the three stooges up to priming stage. With the first one I had taken a jump start just for the fun of it, he was just missing his arms. The rest were quickly done.

Greyscale men

Guys were primed black, and as soon as I could, I drybrushed them with an off-white colour (VMA 71318 Greyish Blue) as I still didn't feel like setting up the airbrushery for stupid small tasks. The effect was quite different from the zenithal airbrushing I did the last time, but I wanted to see how this worked out.

I was quite interested in seeing this in action.

Uniform green

With the Nebelwerfer team I used some heavily diluted paint on the greyscale guys, so I attempted the very same thing but expected a non-camouflage patterned triplet to be a much simpler operation. For these guys I thinned down some aptly named green (Panzer Aces set's VMC 70922 Uniform Green) and used it on the hats, coats and pants. The boots and belts I painted this time with black grey, and the kneeling guy's shoe bottoms I painted simply brown (VMC 70874 Tan Earth).

As we were playing with artillerymen, I attempted to paint narrow red edges onto the shoulder flaps and the unmodeled Waffenfarben on their collars. For their exposed flesh bits I used Flat Flesh (VMC 70955) that I then washed with Citadel's brown (Agrax Earthshade).

For something else this would've been fine, but in this case instead of being green-tinted grey they looked like they had been frolicking on freshly cut grass. My first mental excuse was that diluting the paint made the green brighter, which while true, also didn't save me. I had most likely expected to get Feldgrau when I read Uniform Green which are two very different words and shades. Not the first time, not the last time.

A grey fixing attempt

I thought I could maybe save the gun crew by using black grey. That wouldn't ruin them any further so I gave it a shot.

They didn't get worse but also not better in a useful way. Had they been in the Panzertruppe with black overalls, the black grey would've been glorious, without the green showing through. My fault for not double and triple checking the paint shades before starting :D

Anachronox

These photos here revealed my real world scheduling, I played with these dudes while the Hummel itself was drying or waiting. What happened here was that I got fed up with these people very badly. When I decided to scrap the diorama thoughts and pack the men away for good, painting little dots on the camo pattern called me like an army group of Sirens. And oh, how much I enjoyed that part, especially after getting annoyed with this odyssey.

Launcher's photoetch crates

Enjoying flimsy metallic things

Session I

I had to start pretty much from scratch with the first crate. The main reason was that those crow's feet were poking in random directions so badly that I had to press them straight again with my tweezers. A bit like working on misbehaving Metal Earth Models bits but much worse.

Attempting to learn from my first failure I checked what youtube offered and based on that I started using a plastic ruler and an old exacto blade to make the bends. This was the closest I could get to the recommended minimum toolset of a metallic ruler and a razorblade. Whatever I had already done was pretty much bad, but the next ones at least felt like they got bent nicer.

Despite the minor improvements this narrower bit that was going to be holding the rocket's narrow engine was still pretty much horrible. Getting the pieces aligned was also quite weird. In the end I got some kind of a subassembly done, but certainly didn't look decent.

Sessions II - III

Giving completely up on the instructions I snipped off everything from the PE sprue to get the main crate out. I bent the external edges to as close to 90° as my tools allowed me to, and forcefully inserted the subassembly inside it. Then I added an amount of superglue to somehow seal the setup.

After this was out of the way I thought I'd try a different approach with the second rocket crate. I started by bending the main shape first and glued its edges shut. Again the fourth and last bend ended up the worst and I wasn't quite sure why that happened.

Maybe this was foreseeable: when the crate's gluing was cured, I started gluing the subassembly's rectangular bits straight into the crate itself. I expected this to allow me to get the short and L-bent double-T-shapes easier into place, and to make it look a bit healthier.

My first crate was so awful indeed, that I decided to not bother that building order again. Instead I committed to anything else but that, and the result was going to be what it was going to be. My expectation was that the other three would be somehow better anyway.

 

During my first three oath-filled sessions I didn't get any further than what the photo below showed. The superglue I started with was ok to get PE pieces onto plastic models just failed miserably here or had gone bad already. I bought some gel-like Loctite for the continuation, as it promised to be strong and to tolerate some amount of torque. Of course it was going to flash slower than the runny stuff, and I didn't own any zip kicker, so I bent the bits, applied glue, and left them cure overnight as I did my hobbyings in the late-ish evening.

 

Session IV

During one evening's hobby time I got the little walls somehow installed into the last two crates. I also added the long, lengthwise-installed L-shaped bits into the warhead section of the first crate. Installing those was pure horror, as I guess you had guessed already. In addition to the bits themselves were in an imperfect shape, the superglue used in quantities to hold anything in place.

Session V

One of the evenings I added the long beams into the front end of the second crate. My approach of pressing the bit against my cutting mat with the ruler, then bending the other half to right angles with the ancient exacto blade was unreliable. In case it didn't work on the first go I didn't get it angled, I found no way to fix it later without mangling the part. This time 75% of them succeeded acceptably, which was an improvement. I may have used 10x the amount of superglue actually needed, but like I said before, I was getting frustrated with attachments. These started looking like someone's first attempts at welding or something.

This was the first moment I felt like dry-fitting the other three crates on the launcher rack now, the first crate with a rocket loosely inserted. Maybe this was going to be something semiacceptable, after all.

Session VI

To start my session I just bent the remaining long L-irons, again only a part of them went ok, while others ended up being bad on one end. I glued my attempts one by one into the frames using ridiculous amounts of superglue to ensure some results.

According to the instructions there should've been 32 \_/ -shaped support bits glued to hold the long bits and the crate frame nicely and tightly together. This translated into two of those per L-bit. But the whole setup was in such an unreliable state that no piece was exactly where it was supposed to be, so adding some fixed-size supports into spaces that had, let's say somewhat dynamic spaces instead, made no sense.

Following this same train of thought to misery I didn't go and add the same amount of even smaller tiny bits into the rocket engine end of the crates. They'd all been at wrong angles at best, some would've been outside the crates, or otherwise just crapped up. I decided to save time and especially my nerves by ignoring at least 64 detail pieces from my rocket launcher.

Perhaps I should've tried to 3d print these crates at work or something. I just didn't remember immediately if we had resin or filament printers there, as that would've had an impact on the result.

 

All four crates were quite mishapen but I had some hope for painting to help hiding my numerous uselessness-caused crimes. We'd find out soon enough when the priming (with black) was done.

Blood Spirit Alpha - jewelry

A familiar effect

I had done a number of these rounds lately, so maybe it made no sense to re-explain all of the stuff with my energy weapons this time. The canopies required some thinking as I wasn't entirely sure what would work nicely against yellowish and red. Being a limited-skilled internaut, I checked a colour wheel and felt that a green with a hint of blue would be the best option here.

The most observant readers may have already spotted that the hexes got painted with the black primer. This way the supremely annoying smudges weren't there to capture my eyes and attention while doing something completely different.

Lensing and glazing

Like I said, I wasn't going to bore you with the same explanation of the same operation yet again. Who was going to reread it anyway? Below I have the photos of the jeweled, canopied and jump-jetted elements where they were done, as well as a gloss coated final shot.

Mist Lynx

The primary config of the Mist Lynx had no energy weapons, so I only needed to work on the cockpit viewports on it. This canopy was split into five tiny pieces, so perfection was not achieved today. I still managed to get some kind of an shady effect here, so maybe that was also progress of some sort.

I was most concerned about these small Jump Jets on this bouncer, but they worked out pretty nicely!

Kit Fox

Yeah, this viewportset was narrower than Beggar's Canyon, which made it problematic even with my 5/0 paintbrush and my shading attempts. As the first photo showed, the greens overflowed over and under to the Head and Center Torso. Both colours had to be fixed up afterwards.

The tools of violence managed to confuse me totally this time, as you could see from the photo. I just followed my list and as I was doing energy weapons, paid attention to the ERLLas and SPLas rows and failed to doublecheck their locations (Right Arm for both) , while the Left Arm's barrel was an LB 5-X. Somehow I really failed my perception check and didn't recognize the two sticks in the LA as lasers.

These photos showed that I cleaned up the excess greens. The viewport didn't show much unless you really knew what to look for.

A repainting session was coming up, grumble grumble. As a tiny bonus that came with that was that I could ponder if I wanted to add a yellowish lens on the sensor packet above the center pane. If there was space, that could prove to be a fun detail.

Stormcrow

This prime config was familiar from the previous project: each Arm had a large one paired with a medium, with a third medium beamer on the nose.

Ice Ferret

Just about the most impressive bi ton the Ice Ferret was the Left Arm's ER PPC. The ERSLas housed just above it was somehow a bit funnily shaped, painting it didn't feel smooth. In the end, in the photos, it looked fine, so maybe I was worried for nothing again.

Shadow Cat

These MPLas tubes on the Shadow Cat were really funnily shaped. My only actual issue with them was how fixing any overflow was a bit annoying. To counter that sillines the viewports succeeded rather nicely.

On the rear side the Jump Jet nozzles didn't get as nice an effect as I had managed before. I thought to maybe apply a thin white or whiteish wash into them before declaring the project finished. I even thought of using an oil wash, but that might be a bit overkill for two tiny droplets.

Just using a thinned down white Vallejo paint made them look better:

Gauss rifle's heat distortion effect attempt over dark grey

Roighty. This was the starting point: a pretty nicely worn dark grey barrel for the Gauss Rifle. My hypothesis was that the brown, violet and blue washes were not going to have much of an impact on this canvas. The only way to find out for sure was to try it out, and that'd inform me of what to do with the next Gauss Rifle coming my way - or what not to bother with ever again.

First step. A brown wash (Citadel: Agrax Earthshade) on most of the barrel:

Second step. A violet wash (Citadel: Druchii Violet) on a smaller area:

Third step. A blue wash (Citadel: Drakenhof Nightshade) on the last ~quarter:

 

After flashing it looked like this. No strong and easily noticeable effect.

In most of the approaches I've read of and seen the painter had highlighted the barrel's tip with something brightly metallic, like steel or chrome, to emphasize the clean-burned part. For a moment I considered that, even though I intended to steer clear of metallics in these. Maybe a cold grey would do the trick?

Kit Fox's unexpected plumbing renovation

On one evening I spent a moment to repaint the Kit Fox's weaponry. My first step was to redo all the openings black to cover up my mistake. The LB 5-X was done that easily.

As you may have guessed, painting the incredibly tiny Small Pulse Laser worried me the most, like you could see the tininess of the surface in the photo. That ER Large wasn't in the same scale as in all the other minis lately (that may have been one of the key cues that threw me off-track). Here in the photo below they both looked pretty fine after all.

Hexagonal edges

That last photo revealed what I had done on all of them, the hex edges got painted while waiting on something else. Now I just had to come up with a surface for them.

Heat distortion effect round 2

Curses, I could not leave the Shadow Cat's Gauss Rifle as it was. One of these WFH mornings I took a couple of minutes between my morning meetings to take a new look at the gun. On the first minibreak I painted a narrow band of Drakenhoff blue to the front part of the barrel.

After the next meeing I added a new band towards the base of the gun, using the Drukhii violet. Then, after the third morning meeting I added a band of Agrax brown.

While brewing coffee with my moka pot in the afternoon I took a quick look at it, and it did show some effect. It was pretty subtle, but that wasn't a bad thing. So now, was it worth to spend this effort on an effect that was visible at some angles and light? Of course it was!