This will be a short post to wrap up this build. December, not my favorite month in general, was particularly crappy this year. A dear friend died and I had a very rare (THANKFULLY) heartburn incident that took over a week to get over. There wasn’t much left to do and once I could get back to it, it wrapped up quickly.

The decals arrived and they’re not bad, more like what I would expect from decals; neither too thick nor vanishingly thin, they did what I wanted them to. First I removed that hideous circle I’d painted onto the turret, repainted the OD, then did the yellow stripe around the turret using Tamiya XF-3 Yellow and XF-60 Dark Yellow. The yellow is YELLOW so I toned it down with the dark yellow by using three yellow to two dark yellow (which is more of a general buff to my eyes).

Once the yellow stripe dried overnight, I added the square markings with the numeral taken from a VERY OLD set of Microscale aircraft decals (which surprised me by going on as if they were new…I thought they’d shatter):

With the decals on, the only things left to do are apply mud to the tracks, then attach the hatches for the pistol ports, and then weather.

If you want mud and don’t want to make your own, The Scenic Factory makes a great product. The Scenic Factory has a YouTube channel for its products and I recommend you check it out. I’m using “Ardennes Mud” for this. It supplies the basic “mud,” which is acrylic-based, can be thinned with water, tinted with paint or pigments, doesn’t stink, and dries hard:

The kit also provides glycerine-stabilized (he says as if he knows what the intercourse that means, other than it doesn’t decompose) leaf and stick bits:

Okay. Enough free advertising. This is the mud on the tracks:

The last items to add were the pistol port hatches. Then the surface was worked over with a silver-colored pencil and a few different colored pastels…and like that, it’s done: