Bit of a change this post, have included quite an extensive Work in Progress Picture board for two resin ZSU-57-2 AA tanks, destined for indo china. I forget the manufacturer, but its a pig!
These two pictures are of the paint to date, this is what I consider my base layer, all the basic airbrushing is complete prior receiving a sealer coat and then the detailing.
As you can see its a multipart build and paint due to the amount of detail required to be painted with the turret. The turret baskets are separate as I have two spent shell piles to out in them which I clearly cant paint in situ.
These two shots show the build in progress and the complexity of etched brass, converted resin crew and replacement bits and bobs due to fragile resin breaking. Pretty ugly at this stage
What you cant see is the subassembly with the wheels, this was completed separately, and was an absolute pig, the hulls had to be drilled out to accept the turret cage and then a floor reconstituted, The tracks needed heating to conform to the shape and were very troublesome to say the least. What you wont notice was that chassis wall behind the wheels and tracks was coated with a light mud texture at this stage as its easy to apply when separate.
Here we have the test builds to prove the turret cage and superstructure fit together, I hope you note all the brass grab rails, made even more difficult as they curve around the corners of the turret.
All the bits together, you can see the fabricated chassis decks added.
Just to prove my point on the grab rails, note also they all need to be the same size!
Here we have some pics of the pre-shading, initial grey "plastic primer" ( Halfords) undercoat to unify all the materials, and then a black undercoat, this is then work up with greys and whites to make a pre-shade.
Hopefully you can see the effect, although not the best photo!
Here's the paint in progress, the yellow bits are Tamiya masking tape to keep the inside nice and white, without overspray. I had intended to use some MIG/AMMO specific rusky paints for this but wasn't happy with the colour so reverted to good old Tamiya mixes.
These pictures show the base coat applied, I reinforced the pre-shade with some post shade lighter mixes. The weathering process considerably darkens the initial colours, so a lot of the contrast will be lost, hopefully giving a realistic finish. So often modulation techniques are overdone resulting in a lovely technical artistic interpretation, fine as they can be, I've not seem much cubist art in my reference pictures. These are for the table top so they need to be shaded and weathering in context
I sneaked in a up-mod'd S&S models 15mm MT55, which you may have seen in previous posts. I used this as the guinea pig for the green tones as this will be sealed and then a top coat of middle east desert yellow will be applied, heavily chipped I think......
