The A3 marking was the easy part
I’ve been washing and drybrushing the model, to arrive at this for now:
After the first wash of
Tamiya German Grey I added one of Lifecolor UA 229 Portland Stone 64, which is a reasonable match for the pale-coloured sand we have around here. This wash I only put onto the suspension, the lower hull, the lower track runs, and the bottom parts of the AVRE attachments, making sure it pooled at the bottoms of the wheels so it looks like sand laying in them.
I also added translucent dark grey paint (like
Tamiya X-19 Smoke, but home-made) to the air intake grills, to give them a bit of depth. Once that and the wash were dry, I began drybrushing with a couple of different shades of brown, using positively ancient tins of Humbrol enamels — for proof, here’s a photo:
That’s MC 24 Natural Wood (not 110!), 29 Dark Earth, 62 Leather, and 72 Khaki Drill. I love it that two of them are non-poisonous — what about the others?
While rummaging through my paint drawer for suitable colours, I came across more than a few:
Five tins of Dark Earth, only two of which are the same vintage! (I only bought the Super Enamel tin new, all the others come from a few batches of old tins I bought, either in new old stock condition or even used. Some of these tins must date back to the 1970s, because I began building models in the early ’80s and the local shop only ever sold Humbrol with the blue stripe on the tins, and perhaps also the “non-poisonous” slogan. But all of these paints still work just fine — Games Workshop, pay attention please! Or maybe they have, of course … Anyway, back to the model.)
I’m not quite happy with the finish yet, though. It looks too clean, yet at the same time the real tank also doesn’t look all that dirty — but dirtier than the model. The difficult bit is working out how to get to something that looks convincingly like the real thing, though.
I also attached the tracks, before I did most of the drybrushing actually. I made both only long enough for the visible parts, as I don’t see the point in building things that nobody will see. To make sure the one on the right stays on, I used some sewing thread:
Looped through the holes in two of the links on each side, to spread the load a little bit better than if they all go through the same link. I basically just pushed the thread through from the top and pulled it underneath with fine tweezers, then repeated on the other side. It was not possible to tension the thread yet at this point, because that wouldn’t have left any room to get it through, so once I was happy with the number of threads, I pulled the whole lot taut and tied the ends together. Thinking about it now, it would probably be better to make several separate loops instead of looping one length of string multiple times, since with only one break, the track will come loose now.
Anyways, I then rotated the track so the thread is hidden under the mudguard:
Looks good — or does it?
If I’d have only used the link at the end, then it would have. Unfortunately, by using the
two final links on each side, I put the white thread out in the open on both sides. A little bit of paint solved that, though:
The left track I put on by letting liquid cement run onto the axle of the drive sprocket and applying superglue to its teeth, then pushing the track onto it and rotating the wheel so the track's free end went out of sight under the mudguard. When that had dried, I did much the same at the front, though the track there is long enough that it goes past the mud chute, because it’s visible through that. Originally I had intended to use thread here as well, but the length made that impractical.