After almost three years in the making Miniart’s T-55 has been completed! This kit has been sitting in my “in progress” drawer for well over a year now and it feels great to finally have it completed. I decided to try to push myself and try out new techniques in completing it and I’m glad I did. One goal of mine was to not use any pre-shading at all in the painting process, a technique that is very familiar to me and I use in a lot of my builds. Instead I used the dullest coat of Russian 4bo as the main base coat and tried post shading the model to create colour modulation.
I’m glad I placed these limitations upon myself because I’ve felt that when I have a technique or process that I like I can tend to stay entrenched in said process and not grow as a modeller. I definitely feel like this build exposed me to new ways of doing things that I’ll be incorporating into future builds. One new technique I tried out was weathering over a matte coat. In prior builds I had always done my weathering over a gloss or satin clear coat and left the matte coat until the end to tie things together. I decided to stray from this process in this build with the majority of heavy weathering being doing over the final matte clear coat. It went better than I expected and it’s something I’ll be doing going forward.
I also made an effort to use a lot of different weathering products and mediums together. In prior builds I may have just stuck to one specific type of medium in my weathering and as a result I may have not been as familiar weathering with enamels or pigments for example. For the T-55 I made heavy use of these mediums with the various fuel and oil stains being created with MIG enamel products. I also used quite a bit of pigments and applied them basically where I felt dust and debris would collect on the vehicle. In short, I think that the three pronged approach to the weathering on this build (Oils for a general wash and streaking, Enamels for fuel stains, oil leaks, and rust effects, and pigments for dust and dirt deposits) worked well and it’s a process I’ll keep in mind for the future.
That’s it for now! Enjoy the final build gallery below!
Nomad Models 