Green on

The camo green is sprayed on. I used Gunze H405 and just had some nostalgic feeling about Gunze paints. So smooth and nice finish, no problem with clogging (Vallejo, Mig does clog at least for me) and best choice for fine lines (I think I'll paint my 1/72 Tiger I with this, too. Once I get to assemble that little cat). Not 100% satisfied with the pattern but will correct it with the brown - it was a hard decision what camo to paint. Finally I just thought that as no specific unit or no specific vehicle is modelled, why not try some imaginary camo pattern? I hope will turn out nicely. With these two colors on I just wonder how well this pattern breaks the silhouette of the Jagdpanzer IV.

In the meantime some ammo-loading crew figures and some waffen-ss soldiers were bought. Not decided about the final setup (and still... I have NO finished diorama yet, so this would be the first if I could manage to finish it) but as I have nice ammo and nice ammo loading crew it seems quite sure that somebody will load ammo at the end :)

Weekend painting

I had 3 full hours free this weekend. Used it well, base coats are painted on both the Leopard and the Jagdpanzer IV. Leo was painted with Vallejo NATO Green primer. It has a very nice smooth finish but is a bit annoying as it clogs the airbrush even in diluted form. At the end I "over-diluted" it resulting in ugly side armor plates that has to be repainted. But overall the paint is OK and both the hull and the turret looks cool. Now I try to find out: how to paint the three-tone camo... that question applies to the Jagdpanzer as well. 

It was painted with the Ammo MIG late war paint set. No pre-shading. No tricky modulation techniques. Just the paint. It is a bit too light to me, has some satinish finish but there was no problem with it otherwise. Green and redbrown is undecided - maybe I'll use my good old Gunze paints... 

Jagdpanzer IV --> 99.5%

I love this beast. One of my favourite WWII vehicles with its low profile and dangerous gun. The build is almost ready. Really few parts need to be glued on - spare wheels, convoy light, a few links of spare tracks to the rear deck holder, chains and... and it seems, nothing else. I hope next week it will be primed and painting will start.

Deck OK

It seems that all the shiny PE parts are done and the tools are on the engine deck. Now twentysomething tiny loops remained to be glued for the canvas around the superstructure and I can say that the building phase is finished. Slow build, indeed.

The PE was a mixed selection. The Eduard is not 100% so I used Griffon tool clamps and Aber parts (the jack holder).

 

13 weeks

Exactly one quarter of the year is ahead to finish the Jagdpanzer. For the lucky modellers it takes only a few hours or days but for me even this superb Tamiya "shake and glue" kit is taking far too long time. But still 13 weeks to go - I'd like to finish my first armorama campaign...
On the other hand I open every second day the box of the T-35... what a huge beast. What a job that will be...

Kind of a bad month behind me. I had no time for my favourite free-time activities: modeling and WoT. But one reason to be optimistic: I started to run again, 2-3 times a week - unfortunately this is possible only when the kids are in bed - so I take my shoes at 9:00 PM. That is why no time for other, less healty (physically) activities. But some PE work was made:

Almost ready for priming

Now some minor upgrades (clamps around the roof, etc) and I can prime it. In the background I'm doing some research about the camo schemes for the Jagdpanzer IV... It'll be hard to choose :)