It seemed unreal, but it's finally done!

My friends, at times it felt like this model will never be finished, but the time has finally come! 

Compared to the last update, there were several things which needed to be done - dry enamel mud on the upper hull, darker damp mud, wet mud and water, grease, oil and fuel stains, polished metal and antennas. 

Now, weather has been fantastic here lately, which meant I spent a lot of time outside riding. And because I missed it so much, of course I wanted to ride as much as possible! But who would've thought you return home tired after a long ride, right? Lol, so the finishing process looked something like this: Saturday - go for a big ride, get home totally wasted, apply the dry mud in the evening, go to sleep. Sunday - wake up, add damp mud, go for a ride, get home wasted, do the water effects in the evening. Monday - wake up, add grease stains, go for a 50 km ride, return home absolutely DEAD, recover somehow, add the polished steel and antennas and call it quits. But you know what? It felt good, like a hobby - doing it one small bit at a time! 

I also found a pretty interesting and efficient way of adding the dried mud and dust effects. Instead of brushing them on and blending, I speckled them on the model and then dragged them down. Not only it's fast, but it's also subtle, hard to overdo and it looks pretty interesting. 

Every earth tone was the same like on the lower hull, and grease stains were made from 502 Abt. Engine Grease oil paint, which is probably the only oil paint which dries glossy, even if you drain it for HOURS on a cardboard palette - makes sense though. 

Last but not least, I decided to tie the antennas down to make the whole thing slightly more interesting. They're made from stretched sprue and the ropes are from Uschi's airplane rigging. It's a thin flexible string which you can stretch to probably 500% length, pretty nifty for these sorts of things! 

Next up: figures! I'll be painting them all at once because doing them one at a time would take forever. But first, I need to make not one, but two videos, because I want to make a separate tutorial about those exhausts (since we haven't done a short compact tutorial in ages, and I also want to catch up with my terrible work schedule lol). So this means I might not post another update for at least two days because one video usually takes a day as we already know here. I hope that'll be okay, so next time expect some 3rd Armor Division anime protagonists!