Painting
In preparation for painting I gave the model a coat of Halford’s Grey Primer over the brass parts followed by a coat of Hycote Plastic Primer over the rest of the model. Both were applied straight from their rattle cans.
From the outset I wanted this model to look reasonably ‘clean’ and tidy. I know that the First World War was infamous for mud, mud and more mud, but I’m afraid I just don’t like that kind of heavily weathered, dirt splattered finish on my models.
I think that modellers dealing with aircraft, especially those making early aircraft festooned with wires and struts, and sporting bright colour schemes, or gleaming silver jets are making intrinsically attractive subjects. Similarly a figure painter producing a brightly coloured Napoleonic masterpiece has something which is basically good to look at. We unfortunate armour modellers perhaps have less scope for making something that many people would want on their mantelpiece and I think that covering your latest creation in mud and gunk really doesn’t help, especially when you already have a display cabinet full of them. This is just a personal preference, but I’m afraid the pigment and weathering powder industry is never going to make much money out of me.
I prefer to spray with Tamiya paints using their own thinner and these were used throughout the following steps.
The model was destined to be a single drab colour so I wanted the plate on which the mortar was carried to look as it was a piece of unpainted metal. This was pure poetic license on my part, but I wanted to get as much colour onto the model as possible. The plate was sprayed in Nato Black (XF69) followed by a light irregular overspray of Dark Sea Grey (XF64). Red Brown (XF64) mixed with Clear Orange (X26) was used to make some rusty patches.
With the plate masked off it was time to colour the rest of the model. White (XF2) was sprayed onto the upper surfaces and the centres of all the panels. This was followed by a mixture of Red Brown and Nato Black (XF69) sprayed along all the panel lines and around all the recesses on the model. This mixture was also used to colour the tracks.
The instructions provide paint references for MIG paints and state that the model should be painted in Moss Green. I’m not sure that this would have been correct (though I stand to be corrected here) and that maybe a Brown / Khaki or even a Battleship Grey shade would have been more appropriate. The model was given a very light coat of Dark Earth (XF52) allowing the underlying shading and fading coats to show through. This was followed by a coat of Khaki (XF49) keeping this lighter colour to the centres of panels.
I intended to use an oil wash on the model and find these are best applied to a gloss or satin finish. I often use Johnson’s Klear as a varnish to impart a gloss overcoat to matt paint, but find that this can often darken the finish unacceptably. To avoid this I mixed the Khaki with a little Clear Varnish (X22) giving an overall satin finish to the model. Once the paint had been allowed to cure for a couple of days I applied a light pin wash of Vandyke Brown oil paint around each rivet and around all raised areas on the kit.
A further three days were allowed for the slow drying oil paint to cure. I then drybrushed the model with khaki (Humbrol 63). Drybrushing may have fallen out of favour in recent years and using light colours to highlight raised detail can perhaps look a little odd given today’s currently popular finishing methods. However, I think that dry-brushing using a colour around the same tonal value as the model when viewed from a distance can not only sharpen up the raised detail around which a wash has been applied, but it can be used to tie together any underlying contrasting colours to give a neat and pleasing overall effect.
The exhausts were brush painted using several shades of rust colours using Lifecolor paints working from Dark Brown to an almost Orange colour heavily thinned to allow the underlying Khaki to show through.
Thin over-sprays of brown were then applied to the tracks. This was followed by graphite dust, made by rubbing a 2B pencil on clean wet and dry paper, rubbed on with my finger to burnish the contact areas and rivets.
