 1/35 Tamiya Steyr Command Car Kenneth Childres I was keen to built this kit because from what I had heard it was a snap to assemble and I was looking forward to getting right to the painting of the snow camo. It literally took me less than 6 hrs to build this kit. It really is the easiest model I have ever put together. The only additions to the kit were replacing the woefully over scaled kit engine screens on the hood with brass screen I picked up at the craft store. Other than that it’s right out of the box.   As I said before the painting was why I build this kit in the first place. I wanted to try my hand at a winter scheme as I had not ever given it a serious effort. So I sprayed the kit with panzer gray and the canvas top with medium tan... Once that set I shot flat white over the whole body and tried to get a variety of opacities to simulate a field applied paint job... I then came back with a fine brush and the base gray color and proceeded to paint all the chips and scrapes on one at a time... I know there are other methods of doing this that are much quicker (salt method, masking fluid, etc.) but I like the control that this gives me. It is important to be conscious of what you’re doing and not get the pattern too uniform. So a couple of hours later I had a flaked up white wash and severe eye strain. Over this went the usual filters (ala Bernhard Lustigs "dot" method) and washes to add some tonal differences to the paint and bring out the details... I used blues browns and black to impart the subtle hue changes. (Which by the way were soon to be buried under layers of dirt.... oh well)    The dirt on the body and tires was mostly done with Mig Pigments and very dense washes on the lowest parts... The canvas top was painted with a combination of oils and pigments to try and get a worn and dirty appearance to it. That about does it. It was fun and quite a learning experience for sure. There are things that didn't turn out as I had hoped but all in all I am very happy with how it turned out... I highly recommend the Tamiya Steyr kits for a quick and enjoyable build, it was a very nice break from the very involved diorama that’s been hording my time of late.  copyright©2006 ausfwerks |