M60 - More mud

Time to get some mud on our little tank. Last thing i did with it was give it a heavy mud wash. One downside of the wash is that it makes the model very shiny (as we saw with my little Puma). The positive side is that - even after many weeks - the wash can still be manipulated with a brush dampened with white spirit. It also leaves the model somewhat sticky.

I thought this stickyness could prove advantageous while applying pigments and it did. I applied earth tone pigments all over the model with a brush and it left a fine layer behind, toning down the shinyness (is that  a word?) of the overall model.

A thick layer of pigments will never stick to any model without some adhesive. I have a bottle of Vallejo "pigment binder" which serves this purpose. It's an acrylic medium, although I do not know the difference between varnish and this product. I used a brush to spread some binder on the blade, wheels and sides and sprinkled several different pigments over it. Then I stippled it all into place with a stiff-bristled brush, to work it into the binder, remove excess pigment and give it a finer look.

I did the same on one side of the tank, working in mud in the sides and wheels. The left picture is of the untreated side, right picture of the muddy side.

  
I'm going to let this dry and find out later how much of the pigment will stick into place if I carefully poke it with the brush again, just to see how much "binding" this binder has actually done. I will probably overcoat the entire thing with varnish anyway, because that's a guaranteed way to keep the pigments in place.

I may need to repeat this process in the places were I want really heavy mud.

The base was also treated extensively, first with washes to blend the painted colours together and disguise the parts where it had too obviously painted lines, then with the same pigments as the tank. After the last pigments were added, I'm not sure how much of the original paintjob is still visible, wondering if I could just have added the pigments on the black base and need not have bothered with actually painting it ...