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.

Jagdpanzering 27

Weathering session 2

I had two kinds of pigments in my collection. One of the types were those Tamiya boxes with three pigment "tablets" in their lockers, and a two-headed brush/sponge applicator. They looked a bit like makeup things. The rest of my pigments have lived as powders in their own bottles.

With my limited use I had never come up with a good method for the pill-style ones, I mostly dipped the applicator's sponge into the binder, rubbed that on the pill, and then poked that onto the model. The powders I applied either the same way or just took some on the dry brush part, and spread the pigments around the model, and finally sprayed the binder with my airbrush while hoping I wouldn't be blowing away all the pigments.

So nothing exciting or really well functioning, in short. On a random youtube channel I saw a clip where the guy was, after the oil washes, using the pigments like paint: mixing them with his thinner. I pondered this out loud at my workplace's miniature-painting channel and I was quickly told that the Abteilung thinner worked just fine with them, so I initialized a test.

From my small collection of pigment bottles I picked a few to try: Fresh Rust (Vallejo Pigments 73118), Dark Steel (AK Interactive / Pigments), Track Rust (AK Interactive / Pigments), and Carbon Black (Vallejo Pigments 73116). I measured some of the stuff, going from left to right, some steel, fresh rust and black. At the last moment I dropped off the track rust, as I thought I had fooled with the tracks enough already.

Then I applied a couple of drops of thinner with my pipette into the powder. Before applying I mixed them a bit into a thin wash, so that I'd have something else than weird lumps to smash onto my tank.

 

I didn't take WIP photos with the pigments, I just poked around a product at a time and took the photos afterwards. I started with the carbon black that I applied onto the gun barrel's end and to the exhaust pipe.

In my own opinion I had used the rust pretty carefully and in small amounts on tactical spots. My first target was the track in the end of the tank, the piece that I wanted to get to look a bit less uniform. I applied the goo here and there, concentrating on parts where standing rain water would pool in, but not all the same everywhere.

I also applied some rusty goo to the upper area of the muffler, and later on I blended the mix around a bit. Onto the rear deck I dropped a few select spots of rust, such as on the jack, and a few hinges (one visible part in the photo below was between the wire cutters and the spare roadwheel space). The mudguards by the engine's vents also looked like a fruitful surface for standing water and therefore rust, so I did some poking there as well.

On the running gear I mostly played with the dark steel, I applied it pretty happily onto the track guiding horns, the teeth of the drive sprockets and the contact surface of the idlers, and onto the grippy bits of the track links on the flipside.

 

Over a dozen hours later

I took a couple of checkup photos the next afternoon to see what had I done. Especially the first photo showed how the result was stronger than anticipated on the base of the lamp.

These ones here behaved much more like I had hoped,  maybe someone could complain why the intact paintjob has gotten rusty. That was obviously the result of me not thinking that much ahead.

Vallejo's light rust was quite bright, so I concluded that I should've applied it more lightly - or maybe I could've mixed it with AK's track rust to get a bit darker result.

These individual-link tracks were horrendous and here you could see that another connection had opened with time (and manipulation demanded by the painting process).

The metal pigment could be spied on the horns and teeth, but I was wondering if I had gone a bit overboard? Of course I could always blend it away a bit with some thinner, especially here the last photo showed how the drive sprocket was half-coated in steely dust. On the tracks it looked great, though.

In the Zeldaland

Breath of the Wild

Almost two years ago I was blabbering how I started playing BotW with the Project Assistants earlier that year, found two Divine Beasts and left them do their things, and continued exploring the world. I kept playing half-randomly whenever I had time from other things, so a year ago I had got to a situation where I finally felt like checking the first boss. All the maps had been unlocked and all four Divine Beasts were located.

War elephant Vah Ruta

When this happened, I was wandering in the Zora's domain, so I went to the artificial lake to meet Prince Sidon. From the docklike thing we attacked the megaelephant and then the first of the four dungeons. Inside Ruta I first had to get the map from a map room, that allowed me to move the machine's water-spouting trunk up and down. Then I had to find and activate all four control points, so that the central console could be cleansed from evil (or Malice or Blight). There were no basic enemies, just some Guardians, weird eyes of evil and skullspawners that you could just bomb to death. While destroying the eyes the Malice also mostly disappeared from the area.

 

After collecting all the treasures I could, I returned to the central console that rather surprisingly released a boss ready for a fight: Waterblight Ganon. The boss had two-stages and after about a dozen attempts (and with sweaty hands) I emerged victorious. This had been less frustrating than I expected.

With Vah Ruta freed from the evil being controlling it, the endless rain in the Zora region finally ended, so you could actually climb around in the mountains. Ruta walked on top of a mountain and lit up a targeting laser beam into the middle of the Hyrule castle. While chatting with the Zora king I got rewarded with a fancy spear, but the much more useful reward was princess Mipha's Grace - a passive skill that revived you to full health after death. The cooldown was something like fifteen minutes, which was not a problem outside these bigger fights, I assumed.

Robotic bird Vah Medoh

Somewhat full of myself I went to the Rito's area and to stop the second warmachine. Again I had to prove my skills so that someone would bother to bring me to the beast. The fight that took place freefalling in the skies was pretty simple, you could control your movements with tactical use of the paraglider and some glowing spheres were to be blown up with bomb arrows. After that I got inside the machine and to search for its map room. With the map I had control over Vah Medoh's tilt and flicking it more or less port/starboard was the way the puzzles got solved, to get the treasures and the consoles opened.

Again the main console released a manifetation of Malice, who flew around and among other things attacked with small whirlwinds. Now I didn't need to swim and I had loads of space to avoid and shoot from. Murdering this two-phase monster was easier than the previous one, but I still needed a few tries.

 

Revali, the hero who was the previous pilot of the Divine Beast was also caught trapped as a ghost inside the machine. He too apologized for his arrogant assholiness a hundred years and gave me a new skill, Revali's Gale, that gave me three upwards-directed air blasts (again with about 15-min cooldown) that made traveling easier. Pretty handy stuff, I just most of the time simply forgot that I had this sort of a skill available.

Electrocamel Vah Naboris

Before I spent any more time in Gerudo's deserts, beyond unlocking the tower, I went for a months-long adventure to anywhere else. The scorching desert with its inherent problems simply didn't interest me. At some point I ran low on sidequests and such, so explored the southwestern map around the main town, because the prerequirements just bothered me.

Of course there were some longish extra quests to be taken care of before I could be taken to the wild lightning bolt -blasting robotic camel. When approaching the AT-AT -like machine and firing bomb arrows into its stompy feet I also had to surf on a shield while also following the local monarch close enough (they were wearing the lightning-proof hat). That was just as annoying as escort missions usually, which should've let me know what kind of annoyances were waiting just behind the corner.

Inside the mechacamel the plot was the same as in the two earlier robots: this map room allowed rotating the barrel rims to reveal passages, provide platforms and reveal consoles. The main one contained an electroshock boss and oh my how immensely annoying it was. Its second phase was even more annoying, because why not. After way, way too many attempts and muffled oaths the monster got destroyed.

The ill-fated champion's  ghost gave me a skill as well, Urbosa's Fury was a three-charge "deliver damage to enemies nearby" attack with a similar cooldown to the other skills. I only remembered to purposefully use this skill only once, when defeating a sandwormy monster, otherwise I activated it only accidentally. A couple of now unlocked extra tasks allowed me to borrow the princess' anti-lightning helmet, which was super useful in the common thunderstorms.

Geckorobot Vah Rudania

I left the volcano-dwelling robotic lizard last because I hadn't bothered to check how and with which items one could survive in the heat of the volcano. Much earlier I had braved the heat and unlocked a Shrine for the teleport pad in the middle of a lava lake, but that wasn't even remotely useful. Ultimately I had to find a traveling merchant from the other side of the world to buy some Goron Spice, so I could brew a heatproof elixir that then kept me alive until I could find a dozen fire lizards or something, so I could give them to someone who then gave their fireproof pants (or was it a shirt?) as compensation. The rest of the outfit I had to buy from the Goron clothes shop in the middle of the volcano.

Funny thing: the ice sword was enough to cool you down in the desert during the day, and the fire sword kept you warm in the desert's cold night, but only the outfit made of a wood-fired stove was good on this mountain. Oh well. For a few weeks I poked at the sidequests, went somewhere else for some other quests and whatnot, until I returned to the volcano when nothing else was progressing. The approach-fight to Rudania was simple and easy, or maybe I was expecting something as stupid or worse than Naboris.

 

The fourth and final Beast was slightly different: it was completely dark when I entered. After playing with torches for a while the map room opened the windows and I could turn Rudania from left to right. The same story followed, the boss fight was following the elemental line to fire. Now I was certain that these clowns were tougher every time. Despite that the fire monster died pretty easily, which was only a relief after the electrobeast that I didn't think I wanted to see ever again.

My fourth bonus skll was Daruk's Protection that I don't think I used even once on purpose, because I didn't encounter anything more special than normal everyday enemies from now on. Most of the random spawns I just bombed to bits or just evaded.

What about the Calamity Ganon?

By the early May '23 I had got all of the side and bonus quests solved, at least those that I had found. My quest log had only one entry left: "Defeat Ganon", so what I had left was to cook my pockets full of the most effective foods, and spending any and all of my money to buy all the arrows in the universe. If this sounded boring and grindy to you, it sounded like it to me and I didn't quite find the motivation.

Then the sequel was released.

Tears of the Kingdom

This game apparently continued pretty much straight after BotW, in the intro clip a megazombie magicked half of the wolrd into the skies, broke Link's supersword and burned his hand while Zelda disappeared into the abyss.

Adventuring started calmly on the Great Sky Island, the tutorial part was pretty similar to the previous game. In the first area you talked to characters who told what and why, you got your new skills from Shrines (a few of them at least) and played with them. When you were done with that, you jumped off the floating island towards Hyrule and the game actually just started.

During my few sessions so far I haven't done anything exciting. I followed the main quest just enough to get the next basics unlocked, such as the Central Hyrule map, a Purah Pad (like the Sheikah-slate in BotW), and the glider to make traveling around that much easier. I found out that if you jumped head first into the Malicious holes in the ground, there was an underground layer as well. The map was three-leveled this time.

Fooling around in the floating bits was pretty fun, you could get from island to island by building some stupid-sounding things ("what if I added rockets on this floating bit and pointed two forward and one up?") and whatever came to mind. That was not going to be fun for everyone, but as said, I had a good time, but I also didn't hate the building stuff in Fallout 4. If there was something too evil, you could always just jump off the cliff and find something else to poke at.

 I didn't do much underground yet, I just opened a couple of teleportation pads by activating some glowing things. One of the holes didn't have a glowtree under, so I traveled with fan-powered minecarts in the darkness to see what I could find. At the end of a really convoluted trip I encountered the chief of the Yiga clan from the previous game, and to my surprise defeated him on the first try even if I was running out of weapons.

Yes, the weapons still broke painfully quickly and that was just as annoying as before. Now you just could modify them by Fusing them with some other items. So far my favourite random object was a wooden stick with a flame emitter on it - the stick just caught fire and my invention was less useful than I had thought. This feature was just a bit useless in a closed arena miniboss fight, because there wasn't anything to pick up and modify.

So far so good, fun times and at this rate I'd spend another two-three years before being anywhere near the end :D