Finished: Project VIII/22

Vogtlandische Maschinenfabrik AG (Vomag) SdKfz 162 - Jagdpanzer IV L/48

The Tank Destroyer project that I started barely in the year 2022 was now finally completed, in June. Not that I had rushed around with this, nor had I dragged my feet on purpose. This project, just like every other one, lived on inspiration: sometimes I got a sick amount of stuff done in a handful of consecutive days, then I tinkered with other things for a good while as the Jagdpanzer IV was simmering in the background.

Timeline

My timekeeping was pretty unstructured, I mostly used the timestamps of the photos I had used to follow up the different modeling sessions. If the whole show lasted 28 about 45min sessions, then we got a 28 * 0,75h = 21h, spread nicely over six months. While spinning these numbers up I took a look at how the Königstiger went, and it had only eaten something like three more months from the calendar despite being a lot more complex a model and the build-paint process was quite a lot more intensive.

New method invocations

In an earlier related post I was ruminating that being practically a random gift, this was a great model for testing all sorts of weird new things. As documented, I got carried away painting the metallic parts with a non-metallic paints (excluding the final highlights on the tracks), and that seemed to be a neat approach, at least with the engineering tools.

Oil paints had been tickling my curiosity for a longer while now, but until this early year I had managed to squash my interest in the subject. Luckily, however, my colleagues were even better with their sales pitches than the random internauts, because those things were damn comfortable to use! Their drying/flashing/curing times were incredible, but especially considering my weird schedules that was most often a good thing. Curses, I couldn't fix my overapplication of mud over a weekend? No worries, the thinner reactivated my paint and I could salvage the situation. There was nothing like this with the acrylics, but I was going to keep using those as my main painting tool in the future.

Applying pigments with the thinner was also a new thing for me, that I encountered accidentally, and good that I did. I was most definitely going to play even more with the pigments in the upcoming projects.

Photography

With all this newness, I got inspired and played with my final photos much more than before. The backgrounds of my light tent photos had been bothering me because they (the backgrounds) weren't smooth and clean fresh out of the camera. For reference, any of the recent "Finished: Project n/yyyy" can be checked for examples. For these final photos I spent some more time, checked for some useful processes, and ended up taking my photos three times until I got what I more or less wanted, thanks to someone missetting the DSLR's aperture parameter to the opposite end of what it needed to be.

[0] – Photos in the light tent

Simplest thing first, I set the background roll so that its folds (packed away it was folded twice) would jump out as little as possible. I took my photos with the camera's (Canon EOS 60D; kit lense with specs I never have bothered to memorize) manual mode; ISO 200; aperture f25; exposure time 0"6 aka 600ms if I read these correclty. So far I have not shot these photos of mine raw but still jpeg, despite the seriously committed people swearing by the wonders of the raw format.

[1] – First edits

When finally done with the photography I dropped my shots into my work laptop's Photos, where I bumped the colour temperature a notch upwards, then adjusted the Levels. Being a total amateur I just looked at the spectrum and dragged the dark handle to where the graph practically started and the light handle to where it pretty much ended.

Unlike in this pic here that showed the Levels of a WIP photo taken from the tabletop, my final photos had a pretty much gaussian curve in them with a noticeable amount of emptiness. With the unnecessaries trimmed off, the colours in the photos started looking much more than what my own foul eyes told me of the model in the real world.

[2] – Artifact cleanup etc

Cropping the Levels didn't remove all of the nonsense, even if it helped quite a bit. As the second editing stage I threw my photos into Gimp, where I picked a white and simply started painting over artifacts with it. The result was a pretty uniform white background (or blue in the few photos I took with the blue background).

Being my lazy self I got most of the junk just along the edges of the model with Gimp's magic wand tool's "select by color" mode. The last fine-tuning I did by hand, sometimes poking individual pixels. Whenever needed I also rotated the photo to get it to an angle I felt I needed to get, then cropped it nicely, and finally resized each photo down to n*1024.

As you could see from these photos below, you didn't even need to squint for it, the results didn't end up being nearly perfect. They were much, much better than the ones that I didn't play with this much, that was for sure.

[3] – Photo gallery

Jagdpanzering 28

Twenty-eighth session

This was a finishing round. I went through each of the spots that bothered me, and added what I felt was missing. After a long back-and-forth pondering about the wooden bits I ended up applying a brown wash (Citadel Shade - Agrax Earthshade) on them after all.

An undo-round

I cleaned up some of the larger dark mud oil paint splotches with the thinner. At this point these oil paints had been on the tank's surface for many days already, but less than a week so I wasn't worried. I dipped my /-shaped blending brush into the thinner, wiped most of it off and started working the dark brown paint towards the front edge.

Yup. The dirt layer decreased as if I had pressed ctrl+z. Or not quite, as I didn't want to remove all of it, just fix the heaviness. While I was doing this, I also reduced the overlarge light rust pigments. Those moved along nicely as well.

Mostly I felt I needed to clean up the front and the rear parts of the tank. In general I felt the track armour in the rear of the tank looked half-assed, but I wasn't bothered enough to redo it all.

The muddy dirt on top of the tank I edited so that I removed most of it from the tops of the hatches. My idea was, of course, to model the crew moving around the hatches with their dirty boots but didn't really dance on top of them.

Afterwards I realized that I may have committed an error: I made the mess on the hinge-side, instead of where they would be actually moving on. Better results next time.

Metal

One sure sign of being almost done was that I now painted the barrel cleaning rod's connectors with brass (VGA 72758 Brassy Brass). It wasn't too clear where these were supposed to be just looking at the monolithic piece, but that's what I painted. I had never had the delusions of doing those as nmm, even though the engineering tools ended up looking pretty nicely metallic, with an simple intended non-metallic-metal trick.

Running gear's metallic bits

Next I drybrushed, where I physically could,  some Gunmetal (VMA 71072) onto the contact points of the tracks. I also went through all of the guiding horns, drive sprocket's teeth, and idler wheel outer rims that I could.

From a pilot's viewpoint:

Of course I had managed to misplace the graphite pen I bought in the early year, so I had to usea normal (and hard) pencil to highlight the metal-painted bits. It didn't really work too well to replicate the effect of a track worn clean by the wheels. But it has to be mentioned that I was ridiculously careful with my awful tracks at this point, because they were foul, and had broken off from multiple places, and I didn't want to break them again.

Jagdpanzering 25-26

Weathering session 1

Now that I had noticed that my paintbrush set was missing a brush that would work great for blending oil paints, so I needed one. Or a couple. On one Tuesday on my way home from the office I popped by the nearest shopping paradise and after asking from the personell I found two fitting makeup brushes from Normal. The other one was round-tipped and the other a flat and a bit stiffer.

Before any more complex operations I repainted the wooden bits of the engineer tools with the wood-coloured paint. I didn't thin it down or anything, just repainted the worst-looking parts.

They were better now. I'd try out the mahogany-wood layers again on the next Panzer.

25: Buff and Light Mud

From somewhere I had gotten into my mind to try colour modulation, so I applied some light (ABT035  Buff) dots around the upper third of the model. This was a pretty light-coloured paint, and besides the Light Grey it was the only one from the Lights & Shadows set I hadn't tried out yet.

The paint application was done with a toothpick to keep the dots small. I started from the top of the barrel and the front of the tank. Then I blended them with my new brush, and when I was content, I proceeded to the next area.

After this colour modulation test I got to to the weathering part. I picked the light mud (ABT215) from the weather set and thinned it down very scientifically "a bit". I didn't want to use the paint direclty as thick as it was in the tube, but I didn't want to turn it into a wash, either.

I spread my paint around the running gear, lower hull, and wherever mud would've flown while spinning in the great outdoors. Blending this I used the rightmost brush seen in the first photo.

After drying from Thursday to Sunday the result was neat and did look like dried mud. Without side-by-side before/after photos I could't tell you what was the end result of my colour moduulation session. It didn't seem to have ruined anything, which was from the better side of the potential results.

Especially in the lower hull I liked how the dry mud looked like at this point. I had left the guiding teeth undone on puprose and that looked a bit funny at this point.

26: Wet Mud

After all these years I really couldn't tell if I had come up with it myself (unlikely) or did I learn from somewhere that when working with mud-sand weathering the bottom-most layer should be your lightest and most dry layer of filth. Then you'd just build on top of that always smaller and fresher-looking layers. I thought that was pretty evident in the springtime when looking at buses and cars: the old dry crap covered the most, while the freshly splashed puddle-mud had a smaller coverage.

On this same line of pseudoart mimicing real world, I thinned down some dark mud (ABT130) and added random splotches around the running gear and the lower hell. In addition I added some marks on the rear deck and on top of the casemate, by the hatches, to represent the muddy boots of the crew.

After choosing the fresher mud areas I spread and blended the mess into something less obvious.

The lower glacis plate's right corner looked like it needed to be softened up later on. If that didn't dry too much... For the sake of science I allowed it to dry for a longer time.

This last photo maybe showed that I finally remembered to paint the jack's handle with the Wood paint. Somehow I had left it Mahogany for a long time. Now it stood out a  it less, but how'd you tell apart a light wooden colour from dark yellow anyway?

These wooden handles did not spark joy in me, but I felt they were still maybe the best wooden bits I had done. Perhaps I could add a brown acrylic wash on them later on? Had I been smart I would've scratched some lines into themt to add some woodgrain texture and that'd help in the washing stage.

With the layers of crap the tank had become quite dirty-looking. Now it was the time to put the oil paints away for a bit. Next I wanted to test how the pigments and Abteilung's thinner worked together instead of Vallejo's pigment binder. So yet another new thing to be tried on in this project.