Something different this week on the Anvil Blog! We've fired up the 3d printer and let Adam have a go painting our Tankette.
The Digital Forge tankette is a lovely mini. As the name implies, it's a little wee tank! It is a two-person vehicle, making it perfect as a support tank, a mount for an officer who doesn't want to foot slog it, or as a heavy weapon in a mechanised army!
I was inspired by the WW2 Italian desert camo scheme for the LV 33/35 tankette. Desert camo doesn't have to be just plain khaki and browns!
After first spraying it with desert yellow, I masked the camo pattern off with BluTack- Don't worry! I haven't gone mad!
This is a nice, easy way to get a great camo pattern onto a vehicle. Blutack doesn't give exact straight lines, and it means that you're going to get a few dots of spray paint pigment onto your base colour as well- so that the paint looks like, well, paint! Ironically, painting paint to look like paint is one of the fiddliest things on a vehicle. But check out the result after spraying the model with rust red!
Ok! Ok! At the moment it does look a bit like a cartoon giraffe. but bear with me, it's not finished yet. Next, I gave it a dry brush of some off-white, sponged greys over, panel lined with Nuln oil/Seraphim sepia and added the metallics with some silver paint. For some of the paint chips, I used my trusty piece of a torn-up washing-up sponge, something no painter should be without.
Then came the fun part- brushing sandy coloured pigments all over the thing and black pigment around the exhausts.
This is a vehicle that has been through the desert and has grains of sand in places the driver didn't even know it had! It's not rusty or broken down- just weathered. Remember, less is sometimes more- it's a piece of military hardware, not a broken down old banger, so always add on weathering powders and rust effects a little bit at a time. You can always add more on later, but it's harder to take it off!
The Tankette file is available from Digital Forge, which comes with:
- 1 x Tankette Chassis with an option for the kind of "turret" it can be carrying;
- 1 x Crew Turret, featuring a hull mount with an MG-42 and a slot-in set of crew bodies; Use any torso and heads for your crew! And show them off with openable hatches!
- 1 x Artillery Turret, with a key slot (easily swappable!) for your choice of weaponry; either a Quad-Autocannon or Heavy Mortar Cannon
- 7 x Scenery and Scatter Terrain parts, including 5 unique "Dragon's Teeth" tank traps, a "Hedgehog" tank trap, and a destroyed Tankette!
Grab yours from the Digital Forge, and start printing today!