2012 may not be over but my latest project, the 1/35 Hard Graph Semovente tank from Gundam’s Universal Century’s, has been wrapped up.
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As usual, my blabbering about the project first and the rest of the pictures are down below.
Overall she was fairly quick build, the first coat of paint went on Nov 30th/Dec 1st sometime. The tank is a huge beauty featuring sturdy construction and a ton of detail. There’s so much detail on this that it puts a lot of normal gunpla kits to shame. Welds, stippled areas, and hatch hinges and clasps galore. I understand why folks love to build model tanks. For me, however, it was bit detour from what I generally do. At first it was odd working with such large and small pieces but it’s easy to get a hand of. Unfortunately it’s a lot easier to apply too thick a coat at a one time so I had some bleeding around parts of my camo masking. I didn’t want to do anything too traditional whether it be the desert tans colour is designed in or forest greens. At first I thought of doing a dark grey theme styled after some German WWII tanks but instead went with a custom blue grey colour, imagining a tank sneaking around in a foggy British winter. I left a bunch of tools off the kit, along with the scale figures. Maybe one day I’ll have the room to build a diorama so they’ll be stashed away until then.
For those interested in what paints I used… I started by priming all the pieces with Krylon grey primer. The shocks got Rust-Oleum silver I had laying around and the tracks were detailed with Model Master’s Chrome. Everything else was completed with Tamiya paints. The base blue is actually a 50/50 mixture of Field Blue (XF-50) and Neutral Grey (XF-53). The same Neutral Grey and German Grey (XF-63) were used for the camo. Neutral Grey was used on some other pieces as well while I used a lighter grey, ironically called Dark Sea Grey (XF-54) for a few detail pieces. For dark detail pieces I used some Gunship Grey (TS-48). The other silver details were finished with Mica Silver (TS-76).
The weathering turned out… alright. Really though, I’m not to pleased with how it came out. While doing research into possible techniques to try out I came across many an excellently weathered military model. I keep thinking back to lose, then looking at my kit, and remembering why I never hate weathering. There are a few areas where I went too heavy right off the bat or completely messed up the directionality. For the weathering I used two Tamiya weathering pallets, B (Snow/Soot/Rust) and C (Orange Rust/Gun Metal/Silver). The tank treads were dry brushed silver first I used the "Orange Rust" as mud.
If you’ve made it through my intoxicated recap of this project without any issues my hat’s off to you. Paint samples of the colours I used will be added to the guide, hopefully soon. Same goes for a camo tutorial featuring pictures from this project!
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