TOEMP #9 - Heavy Metal, part 2

Well, I managed some forward motion on the King Russ tanks over the last few days, and got the main hulls and tracks painted. One of the nice things about painting tanks to me is that it really feels like you're getting a lot done. While it may take an hour to lay the base colors on, once it's done it certainly looks like I've accomplished a lot.

I start with a Shadow Grey basecoat followed by a drybrush of Fortress Grey, which is quick and easy, and I find it to be a good neutral color against which almost any other color I may choose to use stands out nicely.

 

On the tracks my standard scheme is a heavily drybrushed basecoat of Dark Flesh followed by a light drybrush of Snakebite Leather. I find that doing so ties the tanks in thematically with the infantry bases, which I rim in Dark Flesh. Once I get them all detailed out I'll go back and add a little road grime and mud-spatter along the bottom edges of the hull using the same earth tones.

 

Once I'm done with those stages, I go back over the tanks and re-black anything that's going to be painted in other colors, these shots are all taken after that step, but suffice it to say that following the drubrushing of the hulls, not only are the weapons, exhausts and what-have-you fairly spattered, but my hands (and occasionally forearms) are too. It's not the most tidy of painting methods!

 

 Painting up all of these at the smae time ensures that I'll be able to mix and match without there being egregious color variations between turret and hull. Although I use the same colors on all my tanks, when you set one that I painted six months ago next to one I painted three months ago, there's a noticable variation between them. One I may have drybrushed a bit heavier, or (and I've noticed this from time to time) one pot of Shadow Grey was a little bit darker or lighter than the next, and the tank is just not quite the same shade. It's not really a big deal, but it is noticable.

The 'heavy lifting' on the tanks is now complete, so all I have to do now is go over them and pick out all the detail work and add the heraldry. My intent is to use these interchangeably between the Mordian 7th and the Adeptus Mechanicus armies, so I'm considering painting in the side panels in red, but I'm not entirely sold on that idea just yet...