I am in awe of the skills you armor modelers possess. How do you get that grimey look down, wow.
Thanks! Most of the grimey look was done using the technique that's described here:
http://www.ipmsdayton.com/content/weathering-art-supplies-part-2-more-oils (under "dry painting"). Essentially, you load a paintbrush with some un-thinned oil/enamel paint, wipe most of it away, and then gently apply that to the model. This gives you a subtle effect that looks nicely blended in with the rest of the paint. It's a pretty cool technique because it lets you slowly build up the colors until you get something that looks nice and because you can fix any errors by just wiping it away with enamel thinner. I mostly used some different brown colors around the hatches, on top of the hull + turret and on the other spots that are brown, and light tan on some of the hatches. I've posted about it
a while back, though I went back to it later and fixed it up a bit. It also didn't look right until I went over it with a matte coat to remove the glossy finish of the oil paints. I also think adding a bit of pigments at the end made it much more convincing. There's other ways you can achieve this but I like how much control this one gives you.
Apart from that, there's a bunch of other small things that contribute to the look. There's a bit of black-basing that adds some slight color variation to the paint, though that's barely visible now. Here's two picture from the start of the build that show it off better:
Apart from that, there's a bunch of streaking with enamel paints (done by first painting the streak and then blending it in with downwards brush strokes + a tiny bit of enamel thinner) and a dark brown wash for the panel lines, rivets, and other raised areas. The decals were also chipped using a sponge chipping (taking a kitchen sponge, dipping it into paint, wiping most of it away, and then using it to get random-ish chipping effects) and I went over them with a green enamel filter (highly diluted enamel paint that barely shows up) so that they blend in a bit more with the overall color.
After that, I covered everything with a matte coat and added the pigments and mud effects.
So it's essentially a bunch of different stuff that contributes to the final result. I found most of the stuff to be surprisingly easy to pick up and learn, though I'm still pretty inexperienced (this was my first time doing that oil dry painting techinque, and I've only done the others a couple of times) and still have a ton of stuff to learn and improve. Thankfully, there's quite a lot of really good tutorials online, with things like youtube channels (
Sergio Solo or
Night Shift are two good examples, both of which are
much better at this then I am) and a lot of things that can be found by googling specific stuff.
I think I have a bunch of WIP pictures so I might get back to them at some point and throw them into an imgur album to show how the whole thing went together. Some of them should also be in this thread, probably pretty far back at this point.
This tank looks really good.
The texture behind the shield on the lower cannon is on the plastic or was it done with paint?
The texture is molded into the plastic. I've seen people achieve a similar effect using by brushing on Mr. Surfacer 500 or putty (one example here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2nI8bogQ8A) but molding stuff like this into the plastic seems pretty common with kits released in recent years.