T-72BMs again

Waaaaaay back in 2013 I added some homemade machine guns and cage armour to a set of Zvezda T-72 tanks (the posts are here and here). It’s only taken me three years and four months but I’ve finally painted the models as a Russian tank platoon.

Here they are in January 2017, just after receiving a green undercoat:


I more or less repeated the way I painted my Chechen tank platoon so I won’t go into detail in this post. You can see the colours I used and a detailed walkthrough of the stages here and here.

For the first step I added a wash of thinned FolkArt ‘Dark Grey’ paint, gave them a light drybrush to highlight the edges, then added some rust to the cage armour. Then I tried adding some mud to one tank. The mud is made of thinned PVA, paint and bicarbonate of soda (more about that here). Here it is when I first applied it:


As it dries:


And the following morning, after the mud mixture had dried:



Here is a group shot after I added sand to the bases and sealed them with thinned PVA. The weathered tank is second from the right. The others had only received a wash and drybrushing. At this point I looked at the few reference pictures I had for T-72s in Chechnya with cage armour. I realised that the armour was unpainted and quite dark with rust in almost every shot!


I decided to go over the armour and make it really rusty this time. However, work got in the way and the tanks got shelved again. After languishing in a drawer for three months, they made it back on to the painting table a week ago. Here they are, with rust and stains:





The final stages were to add exhaust stains and more mud, then add static grass to the bases. You can see shots of the four finished tanks in my next post.

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