This took forever!

My friends, who would've thought that post-shading a model of this size would take hours and hours... certainly not me 😑I don't know why I was expecting a quick one evening job like on that tiny Panzer II. 

But hey! I think it was well worth the time and effort. There are 5 layers of OD on this model, the base coat from last post, a shadow layer which is just un-lightened OD+Flat Earth (plus a very subdued grime layer around hatches and fuel caps), and then 3 highlights. 2 of them are made using the base coat lightened with Buff and the last one is lightened with Deck Tan. This time I have no idea about the mixing ratios as I did all by feel - each time, the goal was to simply mix a color that's significantly lighter than the previous one. 

The model is still glossy as hell because of the large amount of clear added into the paint. The first reason for this was improved paint flow, but the second, more important is so the model won't change tone too much after the final coat of satin varnish. I forgot to spray the Panzer II with glossy paints and the satin coat changed its appearance a lot, which I obviously wasn't very happy about, so this should fix that. 

Now I need to sketch a camouflage profile for the black spots and spray the camo. At first I wanted to spray the camouflage over the base layer and then post shade the model, but I decided against it for 3 reasons - I was in the mood for post-shading, not camo spraying, the base coat was rather dark and I didn't know how dark I should mix the black paint (obviously pure black would be wrong), and lastly, my OD guru and airbrush god friend said it looks slightly better when camouflages are sprayed and post shaded separately, especially when the camo was sprayed in the field on a vehicle that was already in use. He says it's not a very noticeable difference, but the result looks more "authentic" so to say, because you'll naturally post-shade the second color in a different way. We'll see how true that is! 

Last but not least, it's a good thing that I'm keeping all the paint mixes for later use, because I plan to go over the whole model one more time after the second color is on - mainly to adjust things, fix some errors etc.