So, what I'm doing. . . .

At the beginning of the year I embarked on one of my semi-regular armour binges, inspired by the Takom Chieftain, I had been awaiting a new Chieftain for a quarter of a century, so it was almost inevitable that in amongst the plethora of new Chinese manufacturer and their prolific output, that a Chieftain would show up eventually. . and here it was! So that was the start. . I'll post some pictures in due course when I re-shoot it.

But that led on to the Meng Leopard 2A4. I had made a mess of one of these last September, but it was my fault, not the kit's, so having another go seemed only fair. Some lessons learned from the ruined one were applied and it all went pretty well. And this was the result.

 Using the techniques for base painting from my good friend Spencer Pollard, I used very light shades of base colours - the base green is in fact Tamiya XF-71 cockpit green, a very pale grey-green colour, with significantly lightened XF-68 red/brown and Panzer grey for the black. 

I tend to keep my armour models on the light side weathering wise - some filters darkened the green down and made it more olive, and aside from that just some pin washes, drybrushing and sprayed dust.

But overall I was pretty happy, and I hope you agree!

With that one complete I still had the Leopard bug, however. So I looked at the recent Revell Leopard 2A4 that I had on the stash and decided to see how it stacked up. How does it stack up against Meng's? Well. . . okay. It was a fun build. I chose the Greek option with it's variation on the MERDC camouflage. 

 This one was painted with Mr Color lacquers over a Stynylrez primer. Whilst painting some of the colours looked a little "off" 

 But I think after varnishing and weathering they look pretty much spot on , and it was a great opportunity to practice my freehand airbrushing

 The kit builds up pretty well, and is much less complex than the Meng one, sometimes to it's detriment, sometimes not. But all of the vinyl is basically unusable, and this is a HUGE shortcoming - enough to make me think twice about building another. Of the vinyl parts the tracks were replaced by AFV club plastic link by link (each vinyl track comes in two parts for a start WHY?!?) , the tow cables with the sublime Eureka XXL brass and resin replacements, and the mudguards were scratch-built from .010" plastic card using the kit parts as a pattern. Really basic stuff but lifted the kit greatly.

I'm really proud of this one, it came out exactly as I wanted, and gives me great pleasure to share it

So that was my armour adventures in the first quarter of 2016 - next will be either a Shilka (Meng) or AMX-13 (Takom), with an outside chance of a Type-10 (Tamiya). . . but I reserve the right to change me min. . . Oh look, a squirrel!

(Pics of the Chieftain soon, I promise!)