This took forever!

My friends, painting all the details and stowage took longer than painting the entire car, including the chipping and rust tones 🥲 😅

I started by highlighting the surface details on the pickup itself - hinges, locks, knobs and buttons on the dashboard, seats, ammo belt on the machine gun, etc. 

Then it was stowage time. As usual, I base coated everything with Vallejo Black Brown and then painted each element in its respective color. Most of the time I used 3 layers - a diluted base coat (leaving some of the black brown visible for those deep shadows and as an outline around details), and two highlights, mostly mixed by adding Iraqi Sand into the base color. 

The car looks much more cheerful now, doesn't it? Up next is the final step: weathering, and this time I'll do it all using oil paints - including the earth tones. Some of that subtle weathering will blend the stowage with the pickup, giving it slightly grittier look. It's been said that the way I paint stowage and tarps is very stylistic, almost cartoonish, as if done by a miniature painter focusing mainly on fantasy and Warhammer figures. On the other hand of this issue, I've been wondering how a figure painter would approach a military model if he tried to paint it in the usual "armor modeller" way, and how would these two approaches combine. And what the result might look like? Well, I'm no figure painter, but it was this model when I realized that hey, maybe this might be it - post-shading a model (which is a method not completely different from shading figures or stowage), and painting stowage in a more contrasting way, similar to how one would paint a figure. Highlighting details and adding some subtle shading to them just adds to that stylistic look for sure. 

It's definitely some quality food for thought and I'm wondering how will this approach evolve over time!