Slowly making progress …
I found it interesting that Verlinden essentially recommends what today is known as a pin wash a few decades before (AFAIK) that name had been thought up, using thinned raw umber to simulate the build-up of dirt around detail. I do have raw umber oil paint (a tube I bought probably thirty years ago, and it’s still almost completely full), so I followed this step too. However, it didn’t come out that well, probably due to again my darker base colour and lack of experience with the technique.
I also painted the tools, again using Verlinden’s method: matt black (
Tamiya XF-1) followed by drybrushing with a mixture of raw umber and silver (Humbrol 11 from a tin I bought new myself, long ago) in a few shades. He says to paint the wooden parts with burned sienna oil paint, but as mentioned, I don’t have any. However, burned sienna is a deep red-brown colour, so I just substituted
Tamiya XF-64
Though he doesn’t say, I then drybrushed the wood with Humbrol 62 Leather to highlight it.
While I had the matt black out, I also painted the rubber tyres and the spare track links, but these still need to be drybrushed grey.
You may also noticed the white bit on the left engine deck. I had added this earlier, but it apparently broke off without me noticing, and I couldn’t find it anywhere anymore, so after painting the tow cable, I just made a new one. It’s not been painted yet because I also want to paint some of the stowage in olive drab, so I might as well do all of it at the same time.
Talking of stowage:
The figure is Italeri, minus his feet because I couldn’t find them and he won’t need them anyway standing in the commander’s hatch. The stowage comes from trawling through some of my spares boxes for “period-correct” bits. The resin bedrolls are Verlinden, the big wooden box and the ammo cans are
Tamiya, and everything else is Italeri — all of this would have been available in the mid–late 80s. The
Tamiya box is from the M4A3 kit, the green bedroll from Italeri’s M4A1, so you would be likely to see one or both of them on a 1:35 Sherman model at the time