ValMKIII by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
!brt-ft by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
Valentine Mark III Infantry Tank by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
b-left-ft by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
1/35 Tamiya Valentine
Paints - Golden High Flow Acrylics
Weathering - Iwata Com.Art Paints, Gamblin Fast Matte Oils, Sennelier, Gamblin, MIG Pigments
The Tamiya Valentine is a wrap.
The kit was excellent with exceptional fit. Although the length and link tracks weren't needed for the British version - most of which carried skirts which hide the sag - they were easy for the breed. It's a small tank, but the detail is exceptional. Anyone who likes Brit tanks should build this kit - and, if you want something late war, the Archer tank killer (mounting a 17lb gun) is available - although the gun points to the rear. The Valentine was well worth a good kit (figure this one at 2018 new tool) - I've heard the Mini-Art is a handful. It entered serious service in 1941. Many stayed at home (few students of the war realize how few tanks were in the UK - Churchill sent most of new UK production during 1940 to Egypt/Libya - pretty cool move with Sealion still a possibility.) But most joined 8th Army first appearing in large numbers for Crusader in 1941. They served with Monty's forces until the fall of Tunis at which time they were replaced with Shermans, Cromwells and Churchills. Although its time in the British sun was short, it gave excellent service. Although hampered by the 2lb gun, it had performance superior to the Matilda and reliability far in front of the Crusader. And in the desert a 40mm gun could handle almost any Axis AFV of the time - only the very best of Pzw IIIs and IVs had armor that was proof. Everything else under Rommel's command that moved could be stopped by the 2lb gun - and the Valentine was able to bring the gun to battle. Later in the war a 6 lb gun was fitted in a substantial redesign - these Vals were all sent to the USSR. The Soviets were great fans of the early Valentine because of its excellent reliability. (Many of the earliest British convoys to Murmansk carried Valentines and other tanks - they were much appreciated in the dark days of fall 1941.) Soviet officials specifically requested the UK to continue to produce Valentines of all types for the East and they were in action in 1945. (Personally I think Soviet colors and markings would make a very neat Valentine - but this is a British Army GB.)
The last post made had the tank done through filters. As noted, I probably didn't handle the color as well as I should have. Instead of looking at AK Real Color, LifeColor, MRP and Vallejo Model Air color samples I should have looked at museum tanks. The colors there aren't identical, but clearly Bovington and others see BSC 61 Light Stone as almost close to buff - with just a hint yellow. (None of the paints available look right to my eyes). And, as noted, although I had a perfect match for AK Real Color, when put over black primer an olive hue showed up. (Which both LifeColor and Vallejo call for.) I damped it greatly with filters. In retrospect I could have just laid down more base color and forgot the black basing and employed the extensive weathering that followed to give the tonal variation I wanted. Live and learn.
After the filters were on, I put on a coat of Vallejo Gloss varnish. For acrylic varnishes, Vallejos are very good - they went down perfectly with a Creos single action brush I bought kind of by accident - also used it on the Stynelrez primer - excellent gadget and well worth the $70. And I wanted a gloss acrylic on the tanks for the Gamblin umber/black pin washes that went on panel lines, bolts etc - there's a lot of stuff to highlight on a Valentine. I like oil washes a lot. Gamblin's Gamsol is the mildest imaginable solvent, but the real trick is to not use much of it. Panel line washes were cut with Gamsol, but a lot of detail were done carefully with straight oils. (Fast Matte paints dry very quickly, and you should be using only a very tiny bit.) There's going to be some excess - that can be removed. But as you get the hang of it, the excess should be minimal and when given a bit more solvent adds a very good base for a soiled tank. We are talking desert here. Then one goes another coat of matte varnish and the oils are used for fading. I've copied Mike Rinaldi's approach to this. I don't use "dot filters" where you put on tiny bits of several colors and then blend them. Instead I'm using mostly white, and buff, and a white-yellow palette. I apply the oils with a tooth pick and rub them in with a dry paint brush in a kind of circular motion. Do a few dozen of these little blotches and the result is what I consider a very good rendition of high sun fading. (Unfortunately I didn't remember to snap a pic after fading this time. Trust me.)
This brings on the pigments. There's a video on YouTube where a modeler illustrates how you can weather armor with no pigments - enamels only. Leave me out. First of all, I don't use any solvents outside of what I use to clean an airbrush - enamels are horrible - and might get me divorced if widely used. More to the point, pigments are perfect for dust and dirt - nothing else is better. Before going further, I should point out my basic approach to modeling. A few years back Mig Jimenez made the very interesting observation that it's folly to think that anyone can make a small plastic object look like a big metal object. And because this is so, Mig encourages modelers to use artistic license to their heart's content. Hmmm. Point taken. That said, to the extent that it's possible, I try to make my little plastic objects emulate the real artifacts. This means accepting the fact that war is the enemy of art. There are brilliant modelers in Europe and Asia that specialize in wrecked armor or badly damaged aircraft. The results can be jaw dropping. But, during WWII the life expectancy of a vehicle wasn't long. I've stared at a few thousand photos of wartime AFVs and I think rust was very rare, and unless a vehicle operated for an extended period in urban rubble I think chipping would have been rare. (I did very little on the Valentine - there's some on the skirts and the equipment boxes.) Now, you might very well see battle damage - as you can see from both pics above, the Valentine skirts were not doubt most vulnerable to being smashed, broken off, bent or shot-up. I chose not to put shell damage on, but that would a real possibility. (I'd sure put it on a Tiger or an IS2).
OK - what are we left with. Tonal variation primarily due to fading is for sure. (Might note that wartime paints were often of poor quality if any pigments - like cadmium - had other industrial uses. And paints weren't as good as they are now.) That stuff would fade - and unfortunately that's not something you'd see at Bovington. Men crawled all over tanks in service. You had to get in and out, fix things, fuel things, stow things. There would have scuffs and scratches all over and fluids galore over the engine and wherever the tank was fueled. (For this I used Iwata Com.Art transparent "smoke". The stuff is hard to describe unless you try them. But its texture is grimy, the transparent hue is perfect for light crew produced imperfections.)
But above all AFVs in wartime were really dirty. And the desert, really dusty. (I've talked to several tankers - most who served in WWII, but not all. Everybody cursed the dust which got into everything - and that was true in Western Europe and not just the desert.) When I was thinking pigments I something in mind that would emulate a vehicle which went through the dust storm caused by the Crusader below:
sandcrusader by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
I put my Valentine in Egypt or Libya. Had it been in Tunisia there might have been call for some caked on mud. But I didn't really see that on desert AFVs. This time I didn't put on any real "mud" although I did build up multiple layers of pigments behind the road wheels. So the tanks will mega-dusty. But how to pull that off?. I've done desert vehicles before (nothing from the Afrika Korps though) and after this project I can see that I didn't get the pigments colors right. Now, there are enough color pics from the war so you can find soil & sand that was sienna, even umber. But the more I looked the more I decided that I really wanted a kind of buff. So I mixed up a brew made up of MIG Panzer Grau, Gamblin White and Gamblin Yellow Ocher. The base I fixed up is pretty simple. (It was done over Blick hard cardboard and painted with Blick Matte Acrylics - which I recommend for everyone. Figure $3 for 2 ounces. The stuff is very matte.) I used, beige, a bit of sienna and off-white paint. Then a heavy blast with Scenic Express Prepared Matte Medium which comes out of a spray bottle nicely. Then I threw on some gravel, glued on a few stones with Vallejo matte varnish, a few clumps of dead foliage and a lot of the pigment brew described above. I hand brushed some of the pigments over the road wheels. For putting it over the tank itself, I mixed some pigments together with ISP and blew out a fine spray with an airbrush. ISP is not a fixer so it doesn't discolor the surface and it lays down in an irregular manner which is above what I want. Now, here I'm confronting "war and art." For visual interest I would not have put on much dust - perhaps left it off the body of the tank altogether. It would have looked neater and the fine points of the weathering - that took a lot of time to apply - would have been more visible. And maybe next time I will. But don't just look at the dust storm creating Crusader, check the two Valentine pics above. Those things are very dusty. So is mine. I think it looks right. (It also lessens the importance of a spot on base color, although that was not the plan.)
Bish, as usual another great GB. I look forward to spending some time tomorrow examining the work of other modelers: there's some very sweet models here.
More pics below.
Eric
b-rt-ab by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
b-right-r-ab by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
b-lft-rer by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
!r-r-det by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
!turretdet by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
b-left by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
b-left-r by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
B-rt by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr