Sometimes I fall out of love with the model I’m building in its early stages of painting. Especially if it’s a basic color scheme such as olive drab. The color just kind of sits there with no personality.

Well, I got tired of feeling this way, so I drummed up some emotion and started throwing some love at this thing.

First things first though. I had to seal up the decals I applied and give the finish a good starting point to begin its trip down Weathering Lane. I sprayed a (gloss) coat of Future Floor Shine to even everything up. Then, I sprayed a coat of Vallejo matte varnish over that to get back to dull and also start to fade the olive drab. I have no idea how, but the goof with the decal on the hood miraculously vanished!!  The olive drab was still too green, so I mixed up some Tamiya Buff with thinner 50/50 and started working areas from the bottom up. Now we’re getting somewhere!

One trick I use on rubber surfaces (tires) to weather them is a wash of white oil paint mixed with Oderless Turpenoid. This fades the flat black to a worn grey color. This also works a little bit on the machine guns to dull the metal. I will be attaching the mg’s last since they are so fragile and get in the way of installing the figures.

It’s no secret that many modelers use Burnt Umber oil washes to emphasize details. This is a great way to add a lot of interest with little effort. I mixed up a hefty amount of wash and went over the entire model, filling cracks and crevasses to create shadows and overall dirtying this thing up. I got so excited about applying the wash, I forgot to do some dot filtering (little dots of different color oil paint blended in to the base color) first to give the finish overall depth (AAARGH). We’ll see how it goes from here.

You can kind of see how the Archer Transfers worked out for the gauges and placards on the dashboard. And also a couple on the radio in the back. Nice!