PACHYDERM PACKS A PUNCH. FINISHED?PHOTO HEAVY p22

[Robert Stuart]

Good to see your tracks are on Badder ... and you say you're going to add MORE muck to that?

 

Looks good

[Badder]

11 hours ago, Robert Stuart said:

Good to see your tracks are on Badder ... and you say you're going to add MORE muck to that?

 

Looks good

Thanks Robert,

Well my motto is: ''Put some effects on, then change my mind and either take them off or put some more on. Then put some more on anyway. Then maybe take most of it off, and put something slightly different on. Then, when happy, leave it a while and look at it with fresh eyes, and either change it again, add to it, or remove something until finally I am happy.  And always remember that no things get ''weathered' in a few hours (unless they are new) and rain/water/a bloke with a brush and bucket sometimes clean the thing in between,, so LAYERS AND THE PARTIAL OR NEAR FULL REMOVAL OF LAYERS IS GOOD!'

 

Okay, not the most catchy motto ever, but it's true and I've come to realise that it's become my 'style'. BTW I wouldn't recommend it as a motto for aircraft, space, or maritime model-makers.

 

So, to answer your question, yes, I will be adding more muck - mostly washes, but some 'clumpy' stuff as well - that's mud along the edges of the tracks where the Nashorn has spun around a bit on it's axis. I will leave that until it's placed in the diorama though.

 

Rearguards,

Badder

 

 

Edited January 22, 2019 by Badder

[FrancisGL]

An interesting detail the parts of tracks in the low side of the hull.
With his tracks he looks very cool, I would like very much to see how he looks with his "snowshoes" ...

Cheers Badder 👍

[Prop Duster]

Badder'      Such a wonderful Tutorial  of the famous "Mudding Up and Toning Down and Adding To and Removing After Some Rubbing Down"-just marvelous!   

All in the preparation of establishing a basis for the final  mudding up and toning down and adding to and removing after some rubbing down-ness, to come. 

I am truly in awe - or in the Dutchy of Plastic - or California - or...Well never mind, my waffles are done    and so am I     

Seriously, Really great stuff so far and you future plans sound like a winner-even if you "tweak" them a bit.😉

[Badder]

5 hours ago, FrancisGL said:

An interesting detail the parts of tracks in the low side of the hull.
With his tracks he looks very cool, I would like very much to see how he looks with his "snowshoes" ...

Cheers Badder 👍

Hi Francis,

I think I sad that I was going to build this Nashorn OOB, with just a couple of additions. Well, I've ended up with rather more than a couple! Adding the tracks to the hull sides was a lot easier than adding a all that extra armour plate to my Sherman in the first AFV STGB though!

I did give my Nashorn a sprinkle with snow today, just to see how and where it settled, and how it looked, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. It wasn't quite on a par with bicarbonate of soda for the 'look',  but the Woodland Scenics 'Soft Flake Snow' is completely inert and so is a much safer option. I suspect I'll end up using that on the tracks, suspension and wheels.

 

Rearguards,

Badder

 

4 hours ago, Prop Duster said:

Badder'      Such a wonderful Tutorial  of the famous "Mudding Up and Toning Down and Adding To and Removing After Some Rubbing Down"-just marvelous!   

All in the preparation of establishing a basis for the final  mudding up and toning down and adding to and removing after some rubbing down-ness, to come. 

I am truly in awe - or in the Dutchy of Plastic - or California - or...Well never mind, my waffles are done    and so am I     

Seriously, Really great stuff so far and you future plans sound like a winner-even if you "tweak" them a bit.😉

Thanks Steve,

'Tweak' is possibly too subtle a word for what I tend to do!

I've just had an image pop into my head of all those masterpieces painted by the great artists, and underneath all those layers some completely different painting that the artist thought   'not good enough' or where an artist was so poor he'd not be able to afford new canvas and so would paint over his older work.

I'm not saying that's what I do, because, well, I don't end up with a masterpiece,

 

On that note though, I once found an old violin and an oil painting, dumped in a skip. I rescued them and took them to be valued. The chap said 'Do you know what you have there?'

The fact that he had even asked the question raised my hopes 'No,' I replied, almost shaking with anticipation.

'Well, what you have there sir, is a Rembrandt, and a Stradivarius!'

I was just about to faint when he added 'Unfortunately Stradivarius was rubbish at painting and Rembrandt couldn't play violin to save his life.'

 

 

Rearguards,

Badder

 

 

[Badder]

I masked off the fighting compartment.....  note the 'filthy' exterior again! No, really, it's not a base coat. The gun mantle is the only thing purposefully painted! Any dirt, dust, grease, specks of paint, etc which 'spoils the finish' will in fact increase the realism when it comes to the chipping/rubbing back.

I won't be adding any of other parts to the Nashorn's upper hull/superstructure until after the whitewash has been applied and rubbed back.

 

So pale it almost looks white. And this photo is pretty faithful to the true colour.

 

 

After this photo was taken (below) I tidied up that messy join at the top nearest corner of the fighting compartment.

 

 

First view of the Nashorn mit Winterketten, from the rear.

 

A bit more in the way of surface contamination at the rear, but its all good. I suspect the corner overhanging the exhaust pipe on the left will have some character because of it.

 

 

I was originally intending to do what I did with my previous Nashorn.... to apply a 3 colour camo scheme, then whitewash over the whole lot, then rub back and expose just small areas of it - so small as to wonder if the underlying camo scheme was ever worth the hassle.

But now I'm thinking to weather the whitewash back more heavily, and have  the underlying camo scheme exposed to closer inspection.

 

I currently have 3 'favoured' possibilities for the camo scheme,.

Ambush Camo,

Disc Camo.

2 or 3 colour er..... not sure what it's called.... that kinda stringy web camo - almost a 'fish net'pattern.

'

 

TFL

Badder

[PlaStix]

Hi Badder. Well it's certainly looking very good in it's whitewash coat and the winterketten really add to the appearance. 

Kind regards,

Stix

[Badder]

54 minutes ago, PlaStix said:

Hi Badder. Well it's certainly looking very good in it's whitewash coat and the winterketten really add to the appearance. 

Kind regards,

Stix

Thanks Stix,

Although that's not a coat of whitewash!

 

That's the paler dunkelgelb base coat. It'll darken up a little after I've added the other colours and some washes.

Just deciding now what pattern to use.

 

 

Rearguards,

Badder

[FrancisGL]

If you decide to do a white camo, the contrast with those IMHO tracks will look great...

Cheers Badder 👍

[PlaStix]

14 minutes ago, Badder said:

that's not a coat of whitewash!

.....well on my screen it looked sort of off white so assumed it was! 😜

Hope you manage to decide on suitable camo.

Kind  regards, 

Stix

[Badder]

48 minutes ago, FrancisGL said:

If you decide to do a white camo, the contrast with those IMHO tracks will look great...

Cheers Badder 👍

Hi Francis,

Yes, I will be whitewashing it. I am going to go for 'heavily worn' whitewash though, so as to signify a Nashorn which made it through the worst of the winter 1944-45

 

Rearguards,

Badder

46 minutes ago, PlaStix said:

.....well on my screen it looked sort of off white so assumed it was! 😜

Hope you manage to decide on suitable camo.

Kind  regards, 

Stix

It's not your screen Stix. It looks off white in real life!

It's from the MIG 1945 Late German Set, (For War Gamers) and is a shade of dunkelgelb used to 'fade' the pure dunkelgelb.

And yes, I've decided on the camo scheme.

 

Rearguards

Badder

[Badder]

I've been wanting to try a 3-colour camo scheme for a long time now.

 

My first and only ever attempt was with a Tiger I, which was also my first ever German tank, first ever use of an AB on a model and - apart from a brief and inconclusive visit to Schumi's 2000 F1 Ferrari and Tamiya's Prince of Wales  - my first model for over 35yrs. Incidentally, that was also my 'opening shot' upon joining BM, and is available to view in the diorama RFI 'Somewhere near Villers Bocage' my first ever completed diorama.

That Tiger, '121' turned out rather too dark, with the camo hardly noticeable, and the accompanying infantry were in uniforms of the wrong period.... but hey ho!

 

I digress.

 

I'm repeating myself here - for the benefit of any late-comers to this thread - but I had intended that this Nashorn be fully whitewashed and only slightly worn back. I have since changed my mind and will be wearing it back a lot more, exposing the camo beneath.

 

 

In essence then, this Nashorn will be my second attempt at a 3-colour camo. I immediately liked the look of Ambush camo, and disc camo, and the 'string bag/fish net camo which I don't know the name of.

Searching images on the interthingy, I could find surprisingly few photos of Nashorns wearing ANY kind of camo pattern - most being fully winterized with whitewash, or in plain dunkelgelb. Those that did sport camo patterns were in graing B&W and unhelpful, while others were, in my eyes, rather uninspiring. Searching specifically for 'Nashorns in disc camo' and Nashorns in Ambush camo' I could only find model Nashorns, and artist's impressions in books.

 

Then I found this image:

 

 

Clearly, this is not a Nashorn in a modern day museum, or restoration yard, and must be fairly contemporary to the end of WWII. But whilst this (late) Nashorn has had a plastering of snow and frost, and the photo is grainy and black and white, I'm pretty sure that it's wearing a variation of 'disc camo'.  Most especially, the upper regions of the side panel (above the radiator grill) seem to show dark 'conglomerations' of circles over (presumably) dunkelgelb. Other areas too seem to have the same pattern as well though - the gun barrel and even the sides of the hull.  

 

Whilst this is not quite the version of disc camo that I was after, it is interesting, so this is the style of camo I'll be going for.

 

There are masks available commercially for airbrushing these and similar camo schemes, but I haven't checked on the prices. If they are cheap enough and readily available, I may resort to purchasing some. My first instinct though is to make my own masks, or AB the pattern freehand.

 

BTW, yes I've checked my extensive collection of paper punches, and there's nothing suitable for punching out masks - unless I consider going to the extreme and go for 'oak leaf camo'.

 

TFL

Badder

[Robert Stuart]

I'm with you, @Badder on the difficulty in finding ar time photos revealing camouflage on these Pz III/IV chassis.  And frustrating - there are many, many Nashorns captioned as Hummels (and I'm sure there must be Hummels that have been mislabeled as Rhinos).

 

 

In that photo, there are intriguing differnces in ?snow? cover between the Nashorn's glacis plate and the shields of the two anti-tank guns to the right.

[Badder]

15 hours ago, Robert Stuart said:

I'm with you, @Badder on the difficulty in finding ar time photos revealing camouflage on these Pz III/IV chassis.  And frustrating - there are many, many Nashorns captioned as Hummels (and I'm sure there must be Hummels that have been mislabeled as Rhinos).

 

 

In that photo, there are intriguing differnces in ?snow? cover between the Nashorn's glacis plate and the shields of the two anti-tank guns to the right.

Hi Robert,

Yes, it's very inconsiderate of the soldiers not to have taken as many photos as they could have done, at the time. Also, not one of them thought to upload the photos to the internet for posterity. The number of photos that must have gone mouldy in bedroom drawers and in shoe boxes on top of wardrobes must have been very high. (The number of photos, not the wardrobes)

As for the photo above, it looks to me like the Nashorn and the nearest anti-tank gun to it were 'blasted' by almost horizontal wind-driven snow, whereas the snow on the other gun seems more to have 'settled' on it (along the top of the barrel and tops of the wheels.

There was no information explaining this photo, but I would guess this was a yard where captured armour and artillery etc were stored, and is dated either during one of the late war winters, or a post-war winter. It may be that the equipment was snowed on at different times, and in different places and where then moved to this 'yard' with snow still on them. Or maybe the nearest AT gun was also blasted with snow,, but was turned and moved in order to give a better photographic view of the Nashorn, the 'blasted' side now facing away from the camera?

 

Rearguards,

Badder

[Badder]

Well, the first attempt at disc camo failed. I used negative masks - which I made - but the holes I punched into the plastic film were a bit too large (5mm) and so Nassy ended up looking like it had measles. I tried to improve things by the additional use of a single-circle mask, but didn't bother going any further because I the overall effect wasn't going to look like any German camo that I have seen.

 

Today though, I dropped into Hobbycraft, looking for something which could make smaller holes, or alternatively, something that could be used to create smaller, positive masks - like sticky circular labels. There were some punches that would cut small circles - but they weren't small enough. As for the 'positive' alternative, I found some 'glue dots' which may do the job and also some circular stick-on 'gems'. The 'glue dots' are described as being 'permanent' though and could prove difficult to remove after spraying, so I am going to give the gems a go first. They are 3mm in diameter and may prove to be perfect.

 

Photos later.

 

 

TFL

Badder

[Robert Stuart]

40 minutes ago, Badder said:

was turned and moved in order to give a better photographic view of the Nashorn,

Doctoring the scene to make a better photo! Arrgh, yes, a very old trick ... Rodger Fenton is said to have added cannon balls in this image taken after the Charge of the Light Brigade (1855) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Roger_Fenton_-_Shadow_of_the_Valley_of_Death.jpg

 

Re disc camo - look fro Archer Transfers - there are four sizes on this page: https://www.archertransfers.com/CAT_GermanCompleteSets35Panther.html
Or Uschi van der Rosten https://www.uschivdr.com/products-in-detail/masks-disc-camo-35th-and-48th/

Historex Agents sell Archer stuff - but I couldn't see the stencils on their Archer page

 

{edit} p.s. just seen the prices on that Archer stuff 😟🤔 {/edit}

[Badder]

40 minutes ago, Robert Stuart said:

Doctoring the scene to make a better photo! Arrgh, yes, a very old trick ... Rodger Fenton is said to have added cannon balls in this image taken after the Charge of the Light Brigade (1855)

  

Re disc camo - look fro Archer Transfers - there are four sizes on this page:
Historex Agents sell Archer stuff - but I couldn't see the stencils on their Archer page

 

{edit} p.s. just seen the prices on that Archer stuff 😟🤔 {/edit}

I doubt Rodger Fenton added those cannon balls. I bet he paid locals to do it! I'm no expert on cannon balls, but given the stoney ground, I'd have though ones that had been fired would look a bit tatty to say the least.

 

I've had a look at 'off the shelf' masks for disc camo. I can't find any that are made specifically for the Nashorn. Yes, they would be handy for masking the sides of the fighting compartment, gun mantlet, and with some fiddling, the glacis, but not the raised driver's position. I will have another go at negative masking with 'gems' and paper circles, and if that doesn't work I will consider the positive masks you mentioned.

 

Rearguards,

Badder

[Badder]

So, I've been up until 3.00am, having a go at the disc camo. By 1.00am, I had the whole Nashorn in its red/brown and dark green undercoat and the glacis 'discified' with gems and ready to spray over with dark yellow. (I thought I'd start with the hardest section first because if it proved impossible, I wouldn't have wasted time discifying the rest first)

The paint went on and I gave it a blow dry with the AB and a further hour before attempting to remove the gems, (When first applied, they COULD be blown off with a sharp blast of the AB) Well, after an hour or so, the gems proved harder to remove than I had anticipated. Their domed shape meant that they were impossible to grip with tweezers and neither could the be pulled off using Blu-tac, so they had to be prised off with a scalpel blade. Worse still, their 'sticky bottoms' didn't all come away with the gems and remained stuck to the Nashorn. Trying to remove them without scratching the underlying paint was almost impossible.

 

Once removed, the result wasn't awful. But it wasn't good, either,  what with the scratches, but it would have been better if I'd been practiced enough to have worked out a better underlying red/brown and dark green scheme and how it should interact with the dark yellow areas.

And that last point is the biggest disappointment. Usually, the dark yellow is the base and it's easy to just spray roughly equal amounts of the red/brown and dark green over it in whichever style is wanted. Here, you're spraying one colour over the top of two. It's not easy to get the balance between all three right without some very careful planning. That's where I failed.

I'm tired and a bit disappointed, so I will look at it again tomorrow, but for now my heart is saying disc camo is beyond my skill level just now and I should stick to what I know - whitewash over a 'normal' 3-colour camo.

 

 

TFL

Badder

[Ozzy]

Hopefully in a little daylight it won’t look as bad? I’m sure whatever you've accomplished will look good under a whitewash.

[PlaStix]

Hi Badder. Hope you manage to get it sorted to your satisfaction. 🤞🏻

Kind regards,

Stix

[Badder]

8 hours ago, Ozzy said:

Hopefully in a little daylight it won’t look as bad? I’m sure whatever you've accomplished will look good under a whitewash.

Hi Clive,

It's been a funny old day. When I say 'funny' I mean rubbish. First off I had to tidy my workstation up by order of SWMBO. During that process, I somehow lost the lid to my AB colour pot. It took nearly 2hrs to find it. It had somehow gotten into a bin bag full of er... rhymes with 'trap'. When I eventually got to see to the Nashorn, it wasn't looking so bad as it did in the early hours. I decided to disc-up the side panels, using a positive mask rather than a negative one, but......

 

Rearguards

Badder

 

3 hours ago, PlaStix said:

Hi Badder. Hope you manage to get it sorted to your satisfaction. 🤞🏻

Kind regards,

Stix

Hi Stix,

It's been a funny old day. When I say 'funny' I mean 'rubbish.' I did have a go at making a full-sized positive mask for the side panels, and all was going well until half way through when I accidentally CA'd the thing to my cutting matt and ripped the centre out of the mask trying to unstick it! That was the final straw for the idea of 'disc camo'.

 

Rearguards,

Badder

 

 

[Badder]

This is a bit embarrassing, but.....

 

The first go at disc camo, using a homemade positive mask - a hole punched through a transparent plastic strip....

 

I'm sure this would have turned out okay, IF I had continued adding more dots. I did make another mask with 3 holes in it to speed up the process and latterly I was making a full-sized mask (which got ripped apart) but the glacis was still going to be a problem.

 

I then went for negative masking using stick-on gems from Hobbycraft.....

 

Which, again, might have worked out fine, had I continued with it. But sticking all those gems on, and getting them off again wasn't something I felt I could cope with, mentally! Besides, I hadn't taken the time to get the underlying camo right and I was just generally hacked off with it all.

 

 

So, more out of bloody-mindedness than any sensible plan, I slapped the decals on and splashed a white ink wash over one of the panels, and sepia ink wash over them both, just because I really shouldn't!

 

 

 

 

 

 

And whilst this looks a right mess, I do actually rather like it!

Of course, it's absolutely NOT going to remain like this! The whitewash will get done properly, and it will be worn back. It just won't get worn back a large amount.

 

Although the Nashorn is looking messy, with a few patches where paint layers were 'pulled off', I am perfectly happy to leave them as they will create character! Forget about creating chips with chipping fluid, or painting them on by brush THESE ARE REAL CHIPS!

 

TFL

Badder

 

 

 

 

Edited January 27, 2019 by Badder

[SoftScience]

Pommern, eh? These boys were from my place of birth.

[Ozzy]

Good to hear you found your paint top, I’m forever going through the bin once I’ve had a big clear up.

[Badder]

7 hours ago, SoftScience said:

Pommern, eh? These boys were from my place of birth.

I know Pommern is a region near the Baltic, and I've seen a few photos of Nashorns with other regional and town names on.  In the M3/M4 STGB we had a few Shermans with UK town names.... a couple named after small towns within a 10-25 minute drive from where I live. Those Shermans were 'sponsored' by the townspeople, and it's a shame they never got them back after the war!😁

 

Rearguards,

Badder

1 hour ago, Ozzy said:

Good to hear you found your paint top, I’m forever going through the bin once I’ve had a big clear up.

I'd used plastic shopping bags to gather up paper, cardboard, tissue, off-cuts of foam, wood, old sprues, empty or near empty glue bottles and general modelling 'dirt' and had used one bag of such rubbish as a fire lighter. Purely by chance, not the one that the lid had ended up in!

 

Reargaurds

Badder