Mike: Glad to see your UC family is growing healthy and sorry to hear about your connection problems. Anyway I hope you will follow being with us despite of that and update us when you have a chance.
Darren: Thanks for your words regarding my pics. To say true I Iike and enjoy taking them -although it takes time too- and images are really important to me because modelling is mainly visual and modelling is universal language for modellers alike, so images clearly fill the gap of my poor expresion and language barrier.
As for the colours I am using, I always try to show them clearly in the images if possible, but this time codes are out of focus unfortunately because vehicle hides them. Anyway for the chipping mix, I do not follow a fixed rule and change the mix depending on every vehicle and try to attend to what the model needs at any point. I consider myself one intuitive modeller, so I am not good at following a colour chart, and think you might have confidence and do same thing and try to discover by yourself what your model needs too. I am sure you have your own criteria for that.
Anyway, as for chipping any dark mix can work well (dark brown, dark green, dark sand...) depending on the base color and the effect you want to achieve (fresh chipping, old chipping, overlapped chipping...) and also have to say that almost any paint can work well equally. I used vallejo Acrylics because I like them, but I am also sure to get same result with enamels for instance, I mean everything is open to a new way if someone wants to give a try.
This time I made a dark mix with flat black (950?) and mahogany brown (846). Basically any red brown/hull red can work well for this mix.
Karl: See? Everything is working well and yours model is not glossy anymore... Yours T-34 is going pretty well to me and think shade on running gear fits perfectly to this vehicle. I hope you do not regret to attend to ours suggestions and I am glad to see you did not hesitate to make things in a different way than usual. That is the way to improve in my opinion, and not many modellers dare to do it. Good for you!
As for your tank, I think it is near completion and guess you already have pictured in your mind things left to make . Anyway if you want to know my list of things you can still make with very little effort, basically all of them are related to enhance contrast by adding elements painted in different colours, as follows:
1) Will you add little dust? I think light dust on upper surfaces would add nice contrast.
2) Will you add accesories? I think you also can add little more contrast with some extra parts as ammo boxes, spare track links and towing cables supplied in the kit.
3) Good work on front light lens. If you wish you can paint font light in gloss black because these parts are interchangeable with automotive parts, so T-34 lights are same from utility trucks and these were gloss black form the factory. I painted it so in some former russian models and it is a nice touch in my opinion.
4) As for fuel stains, asides the ones on the rear tanks, you also can add stains along hull sides if you wish. You can see two fuel tank caps just at both sides of turret front (oval ones).
5) If you wish, do not hesitate to add opaque black exhaust smoke screens at rear. That is very common on T-34s.
6) And final touch would be to add extra metallic shine on tracks and wear off paint effect with a pencil carefully. You also mentioned this tip before so I know you will make it.
Okay I think that is all and now -if you wish- you can blame on me to make you work more, but all those things are -believe it or not- easy and fast to make, and your model would gain a lot in my opinion (anyway if you want to ignore my list and to complete your model soon, I understand and respect it).
Lu