Welds and Zimmerit!

Hello survivors!

There's been finally some decent progress! The weld beads are chipped (Tamiya Chrome Silver + a light pass of Ammo Wash for dark yellow) and I also managed to chip the Zimmerit. Here's where things got a bit tricky.

First of all, I was looking forward to this step because I've seen how amazing the large light tan remnants of the pattern can look. Unfortunately, this seems to work only in conjunction with the standard red oxide primer... it just looked horrible on the panzer grey 🤣 So all I've been looking forward to went out of the window. 

Another interesting thing is, my next logical step was to outline the chipped edges with the Deck Tan from Vallejo, but this turned out to be another bad move, as it made the zimm coat look optically thicker. Luckily I did all of this on a test piece. So: remnants of the pattern on the exposed armor didn't work, and outlining the pattern didn't work either. What now?!

So, almost defeated, I resorted to some subtle chipping on the actual zimmerit coat, just here and there, but because of the deep ridges, I wasn't able to "dance" with my paintbrush across the surface like usual. So....

I had to complement this step with speckling and a diluted white oil paint. This did the trick, but the effect was now too shiny and I felt like waiting until the earth tones to tone it down wouldn't be enough. So, another oil paint, this time heavily diluted Medium Brown, actually the same one I used during the oil dot stage, and I applied it as a local wash/filter over the largest chips. This blended them slightly with the surrounding area and also made them look dirty. 

To conclude: yay? 

Up next: shell impacts and detail painting! Hopefully this will be more fun! 😝

P.S.: hope you're all healthy and safe. I had to go grocery shopping today and after returning home I felt like coming back from a war zone.