Vindicator #1 - Day 4

I managed to sneak in some last minute time with the airbrush and actually make some clearly identifiable progress!  

Yesterday I left off with the masking of the hazard stripes.  So step one today was to hit the dozer blade with a coat of Flat Balck

And then create a subtle gradient using NATO black.  The picture doesn't do it justice.

The trick with black is that when you highlight it you have to be very careful that you don't take it too far.  Because that color is called gray.  This is especially true on large surfaces.

I sprayed some black down the demolisher cannon as well.  Still needs work.

 I gave the paint some time to dry and then pulled off the masks.  Success!

It's not perfect, but it's close enough.  Any little errors will be handily taken care of by the weathering process.  Which I started immediately.  Using an old piece of army tray foam, I dabbed on some yellow paint to chip up the black.  I fill intend to chip up the yellow as well, but I'll do that when I start in on the rest of the tank in order to keep things consistent.

A quick spritz of dull coat to seal things for further masking and it was off to another set of color experiments.  This time it was a quick little test to play around with metal recipes and to see how the dull coat would treat two layers of wash over the metallic paint.

two birds with one stone

Turned out pretty good!  The wash had already killed enough of the luster that the dullcoat didn't cause any of it's typical problems.  Once things were fairly dry, I went back and painted on the highlights. So the process is repeatable and doing the highlights after the dullcoat will ensure a pretty neat effect.

It dawned on me that I still needed to start prepping the tracks, but I think the blog will be better served if I save that for day 5.