Round Four Report from Abstracity

Minidragon writes:

For this month's Last Painter mini we got a vehicle kit!! It's pretty spiffy too, a one-man attack hovercraft mounting a nose cannon and rocket pods.

This mini is actually a boxed set from i-Kore, so it comes with a good reference picture (if you want it painted like the i-Kore version). The stock paint job is pretty cool, but I wanted to do something different and really try to make this thing come to life! I decided I wanted it to look like it has actually been used a time or two (instead of shiny-new off the factory floor!).

Now, I've never really tried to paint weathering effects (this is only the third 28mm vehicle I've ever painted) so I decided I'd look to the pro's for inspiration. Some of you may have heard of Euro Militaire and Doc Faust's Painting Clinic. I used a picture I found on Tony's (Doc Faust) website from Euro Militaire 2001 for my jumping-off point.

The picture I used shows a German halftrack in a subdued camo pattern. What I really liked about it was all the little touches that made it look battleworn...I'd be trying to recreate all that stuff because it just looked sweet!

Okay, so now I had my inspiration, it was time to get to work. The first pic shows the importance of test fitting parts. The joysticks didn't quite line up where they should, so I had to bend/twist the pilot's arm around until it was in the proper position. In the process I mauled the arms pretty well, and had to do some extra work smoothing them out again.

The next shot shows the various parts of this kit. Everything fit together pretty well after I'd cleaned off all the mold lines, flash, and other imperfections...it looked like the only places that would need filling were the sides of the nose gun (there were divots on either side of it, where it looked like the metal didn't flow into the mold all the way). I decided the only place that would need a pin was the attachment point for the engines.

The base color of my hovercraft was going to be a camel color. I used Partha Paints Galedon Tan. I really wanted to get a nice smooth paintjob on this mini so I bit the bullet, thinned my paints really well, and painted on the base color in 4 coats.

The other main colors of the craft were an olive green and a brownish color. For the green, I used a Partha Paints medium olive green color (can't remember the name...feel free to email me, though, and I'll tell ya!). The brown was Partha Paints Brown and Wolf Brown in a 50/50 mix. I thinned both of these colors pretty well, too - not quite as much as the base coat, though. My reference vehicle had the brown and green painted on in irregular stripes, with thin brown stripes on either side of a wider green stripe...so that's how I painted mine! These stripes were painted on in 3 coats.

In the next step, I lightened the camel color by painting on a layer of the thinned basecoat color with white paint added. The picture also shows that I started drybrushing at this point. I added white to the color of the stripes and drybrushed them lightly, being sure to keep the effect subtle.

I also covered the whole craft with a wash of brown ink. This was a thin wash - I didn't want to change the colors too much, just bring out the recessed detail a bit. Because my wash was thin, I had to apply it twice before I got the effect I wanted.