Creating dirt!

Mrs. Woody would no doubt highlight that I can be good at creating dirt. Give a freshly cleaned floor and it is almost inevitable I walk in with muddy boots. However in this case creating dirt relates to the T34 Egyptian tank. Military vehicles, unless on parade, do not get cleaned very often especially if they are on the front line. Even if they did get cleaned they are working machines and will pick up dirt quicker then Mrs. Woody can pick up on me wearing muddy boots on her clean floor! 

Model wise, the idea is to try to create that dirt and the weathering that vehicles who spend most of their time outside pick up. I have initially used a brown paint thinned and using a small brush tried to highlight areas that would have a stain mark around them.

I then mixed up several different shades of the base colour - mostly darker - and airbrushed these into the crevices and edges around the hull and turret. In daylight you can see the variety of colours and how these highlight the various parts of the hull. The pictures below don't show this up as well but at least you can see a difference to what the tank looked like when first painted which is the first photo.

Now with added dirt!

 Next up is to matt varnish the various parts and then a bit more dirt creation - now where are my boots!

Hats off - hat on!

Well I have always said I am not a figure painter and I take my hat off to those with the skills to paint perfect miniatures. However, now with hats on and indeed heads, the former headless tankers are now just about done for the MiniArt T34 Egyptian tank. From a distance they look reasonable and that will do me. I just need to finish the eyeballs (which defy my abilities to produce anything realistic!)and a coat of varnish and they will be complete. Strangely enough, I believe you can buy decals for eyeballs - I must try those!

The tank itself has had the rubber tyres on the wheels painted and I have used a slightly darker main colour to highlight a few areas. This does not show up too well on the photos but it is there!

More bacon cobs and ice cream!

Another day at the Rocks by Rail Museum where preparations were in progress for Sundays running day. It was to be a steam day but given the hot weather forecast it is not a day to be in the cab of a steam locomotive without fear of heat stroke and the dryness of the vegetation and the proximity of corn fields means that there could be a fire risk. So it will be a diesel day with cab rides. This meant some stock had to be moved which gave visitors an opportunity to see some shunting in action.

Whilst this was going on I was doing my culinary bit serving up bacon cobs and selling ice cream both of which went down well.

Back at WMD HQ and the headless tankers are now semi headed! Need more work but getting there.

Maybe they want an ice cream?

Hot, Hot and hotter so Woody sprays a tank!

We all knew it was going to be a hot day. The weather forecasts and the newspapers have been full of it. However nature has its own ways and these sheep hadn't seen the weather forecast or tuned into a suitable media source for an update - they just knew! I saw them at 7.50am on my morning bike ride so given that early time the sheep probably had the right idea.

A clear sky also produced something that I have not seen since before the pandemic - jet vapour trails.

Back at WMD HQ I sprayed the top coat onto the hull of the MiniArt T34 Egyptian tank - just the thing to do on a hot day but I took it in stages and was in some shade as I sprayed. It is beginning to come together now and I am happy so far!

Looking at those photos I have a need for an ice cream for some reason!

Am I really seeing that?

One of those strange, unsurreal moments this morning on my cycle ride when I thought I am I really seeing that? I am riding along a road which normally is quite busy with traffic when coming the other way casually walking is a Dachshund dog! It was on its own just walking down the road with no owner in sight. I knew there was a boarding kennels a few hundred yards further up the road so flagging traffic down to slow and highlight the dog I sprinted up to the kennels. I finally found two ladies at the back who were looking for a missing Dachshund! I told them where it was and cycled back flagging down an approaching car whose driver said another cyclist was following the dog. I told the driver the owners were on foot coming down so she went to pick them up and I carried on back towards the dog. As I approached there were three cars pulled up and a six people including the other cyclist standing around one of the cars. I feared the worst! However luckily all the cars had stopped and the dog in fright had taken shelter under one car and would not come out. The cyclist had attempt to coax it out but had ended up being nipped on the hand!. By this time the owners had arrived and with five of us lying on the ground around the car one guy managed to get hold of the collar and pull the dog out. Mitzie, as it turned out she was called was freighted but uninjured and her owners much relieved to get their dog back. 

It was one of those moments when a group of strangers all got together and worked with each other for the sake of an animal - one of those moments when you appreciate there are still a lot of good people about! Strangely, I did wonder afterwards what the approaching vehicle occupants must have thought was happening with five people lying in the road around a car and two bikes dropped in the verge!

The rest of the day was hot - too hot to do much other than eating ice cream and collecting more wooded handles, but as the coolness of the evening came in I did put the final pieces on the Egyptian T34 tank that I needed to start painting the hull. 

Even in the relative coolness of the evening the airbrush still had a few issues with paint drying in the nozzle but eventually I did get it the hull primed and ready for top coat once fully dry over night.

If you think that the tank looks odd with a black hull it certainly is not as odd looking as seeing a Dachshund walking on its own down a country road!

Maybe a change of clothes is needed?

One thing about military uniforms is that they look smart on the parade ground but once out in the field they do get dirty and especially in combat conditions. The four, so far, headless tankers that come with the MiniArt Egyptian T34 tank had been painted in a shade of sand colour. This needed to be 'dirtied' as it was parade ground clean and the creases and folds in the clothes highlighted with shadow.

I initially used some Vallejo Game Wash that is a brownish colour. I did not dip the figures in this as the jar suggests but painted it on.

Leaving that to dry, I thin used a coat of thinned black paint to further highlight the shadows and creases in the clothes.

Finally I used a dilute coat of the base sand colour to harmonise the brown and black washes which appears to have been successful. I also used a light grey wash over the boots so that they look suitably dirty as well. Once back at base this crew will no doubt welcome a change of clothes given how dirty they have become!

  

Eating ice cream!

Summer finally appears to have arrived here in the UK. Hot weather means time for an ice cream and one of Mrs. Woody and mine favorites is the Magnum Ice Cream - other similar ice cream products are available, etc., etc, and we have consumed a few of these over the last few days. As the Magnum ice cream is basically a chocolate covered ice cream on a wooden stick, once consumed the wooden stick has a model making use. Handy as I will explain! 

Having seen examples from other modellers, these sticks can be used to fasten model figures to making the painting task much easier by providing a stable means of holding the figure steady. By using a blob of superglue on the soles of the boots of the figures they can be quickly glued to the wooden stick and more importantly, because of the nature of superglue, easily snapped off when needed. 

I had used some acrylic putty to fill some poor fitting joints on the figures and these were cleaned up ready for a repaint.

Having all four figures glued to the wooden sticks, it was an easy job to paint in the uniforms, hands and boots as well as the heads and helmets which are still on their sprue.

Think I will have another ice cream now that is done!

Laid back!

With all that is going on the Country and the World, here at WMD HQ, Milly and Matty cats have a very laid back approach to it all - maybe we can all learn from them?

I did have a bit of a laid back day too and relaxed with a bit of progress on the MiniArt T34 Egyptian tank. 

Strangely the whilst the kit has the towing eye pieces for the tow cables you have to supply your own cable. Luckily in my stock of useful items that might be handy one day I had a length of multi strand electrical cable that was just right. A bit of super glue on the ends of the cable attached them to the towing eyes. 

The cables together with the gun and shovel have been primed and the two turret hatches have been given a top coat.

The turret itself has also had its top coat applied and I am pleased with that and especially the welded seam that I applied which was absent from the kit moulding. I have seen in the close up photo an area that requires a little more smoothing out but I am laid back about that! With the wheels painted up and a few bits left to add to the main hull it should not be too long before the whole tank is painted but in my laid back approach learnt from the cats what is the rush! Oh yes! Mrs. Woody's ever expanding list of jobs for me that is not a matter to be laid back about!

Bacon cob!

I went to the Rocks by Rail Museum today expecting to be reunited with the lawn mower. Instead we had an influx of visitors early on and three were asking if the cafe was open and could they have bacon cobs. For anyone reading this wondering what a bacon cob is it is a bread roll with fried bacon and it is almost a national dish in the UK! Ever the obliging I volunteered in the absence of our normal cafe culinary guru to make them. Well that started it didn't it! Once the smell of bacon gets in the air everyone wants one. I ended up making 16 plus about 30 cups of tea and coffee. They seemed to go down well with no complaints. However the time taking to cook, wash up and clean up meant that before I knew it the time was 3pm so no grass cutting today! Unfortunately I have volunteered to cover the cafe on Thursday so there will be more bacon cobs to cook!

I did however grab a few minutes before leaving to do one of those unique things that railway modellers can not very often do. This is Graham the 0-4-0 Sentinel made by Hornby following them measuring up the loco at the museum.

As I highlighted in a post a few days ago, the real Graham is undergoing maintenance but that did not stop me posing my model of Graham on the real Graham!

Back at WMD HQ I had a few minutes to give a coat of primer to the turret of the MiniArt Egyptian T34 tank. Hopefully some final colour will go on during the next few days. Now it is time to cook dinner - bacon cobs Mrs. Woody?

I'm not really a welder!

Although I have in the past been known to use a MIG welder my skills were such that I blew more holes in the metal to be joined then actually welded the metal together. However that does not stop me from making model welds. The turret of the MiniArt T34 Egyptian tank is missing a major weld around the bottom part of the turret. I could have left this and ignored the issue but in the desire to create something a bit more than the box provided I glued some very thin plastic strip, from my stock of such items, to the turret in the required places.

Once stuck on I then applied some plastic glue to the top of the strip to soften it. With the back of a scalpel blade I then literally pushed into the semi soft plastic to produce ridges to replicate a welded seam.

I need to do a bit more to it but it is beginning to look like a welded seam - not bad for someone who can't weld!.

I also managed to paint one side of the wheels in their proper colour which is brining this project along.

Sunday variety!

Well it was a Sunday of variety. An early morning bike ride bringing my total for this year to 2907miles followed by a trip to the Rocks by Rail Museum having left Mrs. Woody with breakfast in bed. That should earn me some bonus points which may go someway to cancelling all the negative points I seem to earn on a regular basis! Today I was helping out on the Driver for a Fiver day at the Museum. I am not let loose on the locomotive but I am let loose to collect money which may say something about me and how my museum colleagues see me!

It was a steady day of guests but perhaps not as busy as we thought it might be. Whether that is down to potential visitors feeling the squeeze on their pockets and disposable income with the rising cost of living or whether it was the rain late this afternoon we do not know but things will perhaps get clearer as the year progresses. We did have a group of cyclists in this afternoon who came for the cafe and once fed and watered set off only to return five minutes later as the rain came in. In the best traditions of weathering out the rain they consumed some more drinks and cakes and one lady even bought a jig saw and book from our sales stand! The cash till benefitted greatly!

Back at WMD HQ I have primed the other side of the Egyptian T34 tank wheels as well as giving the headless tankers a base coat of sand coloured paint for their uniforms.

Other than bringing some colour to a model, putting a light coloured coat of paint on does highlight any areas that are perhaps not as well assembled as they might be! I am trying to be polite in describing my own incomitance! An example is the figure below where the left shoulder as you look at the figure does not quite line up with the body. I will need to use some filler or putty to rectify that as once you notice something it sticks out every time you look at the model. The other three figures will no doubt have similar issues so I will need to look closely at those when I have time and before I progress with anymore painting.