ooooohhhhh

Now this was a lot of work! But we're now ready for earth effects!

So the most obvious part - I still suck at painting stowage 😅 Sandbags are pretty bad, but it's honestly all I've got at the moment. They were painted with oils, but they'll be definitely weathered as the rest of the tank so I hope I'll make them look a bit better. 

The dust shroud around the gun mantlet went better, because it's more wrinkled, again painted with oils and I actually kept it in the tank's color, because most of the time it's painted with the rest of the tank. 

Another rather obvious part is the left side of the turret 😁I only had one reference photo of a T-90 turret that's been completely blown off so the surface was charred, and it doesn't exactly look like a hit from an RPG, but I wanted to make it look interesting. It'll be toned down slightly with dust though. It was painted with a Lifecolor rust base, followed by a few stains of Incinerated White, then some enamel rust washes, chipping fluid and overspray with flat black Ammo paint, which was then chipped down, and finished off with some black oil paint washes here and there.

The same went for the end of the gun barrel where the thermal sleeve is missing. I don't know exactly why, but barrels on these Russian tanks in Syria are always badly burned. And it looks freaking cool. 

I also painted all of the optics and headlights, and also printed some random bits which I might add as stowage. The wooden crate looks like crap though, I downloaded it all from Thingiverse and the crate isn't very detailed. I might model it myself though... 

And I'm starting to play around with one dangerous idea so help me out... what about a small scenic base? 😱Something extremely simple, I don't have that many materials and tools for dioramas, so I'm thinking just a barren dusty terrain with some crap scattered around (fuel drums maybe, some boxes etc?) There's plenty of inspiration online so...