Post by windhund on Sept 21, 2014 10:48:00 GMT
This is the Amusing Hobby Lowe that I made last year. I built this in memory of my friend John Griffin R.I.P. who unfortunately died at the young age of 49 in December 2011. He always used to say that the Lowe was one Paper Panzer that he wanted to see in plastic, only for Amusing Hobby to announce the release of this beast just months after he passed away. I was intending to make the Lowe straight out of the box but as time went on, I decided to make a small update using spare etch parts from a Dragon Tiger II kit.
I added some mine battle damage. The way I depicted the damage where the mine exploded was to show 2 of the outer wheels have been replaced. One wheel is still painted with a Grey primer and the other had to be taken from a knocked out Lowe and has a Green and Brown camouflage but unfortunately the crew were unable to get a new torsion bar for the inner wheel so had to leave the wheel off.
For the base coat I used Tamiya XF-60 Dark Yellow, lightened with Tamiya XF-2 flat White.
This mix was thinned using Halfords cellulose thinners before being sprayed.
While spraying the Dark Yellow some of the grey primer started to flak of the brass fenders, why it did this I do not know but I wish I had used the plastic fenders instead.
There wasn't really a lot I could do about it, so I sprayed the base colour over the brass, this relpaced the primer as there was going to be another colour added on top of the Dark Yellow.
The Green used was Polly scale Panzer Olive Green again thinned with the Halfords cellulose thinners.
I had intially masked the model with Blue Tack because I didn't want any overspray but as I started to spray I noticed that I had hardley any overspray and I didn't like the hard edge that I was getting, so I removed the Blue Tack and sprayed the Olive Green free hand.
Both the Dark Yellow and the Olive Green were sprayed between 20 and 30psi.
I decided to hand paint the Brown circles rather than make a mask and spray them, I think it looks better doing it this way plus the artist impession at the top of this page shows that this was hand painted.
The Brown paint used was Humbrol #98 Chocolate.
After I finished painting the Lowe, I painted the tracks using Humbrol 111 uniform Grey.
When the paint had dried I used Mig pigments to weather the tracks.
I painted the wheel rims using Vallejo Natural Steel. I wanted to use Humbrol Metal cote Polished Steel but for some reason the Metal Cote paint recently hasn't been as good as it was a few years ago.
I thought I would try and use the Mig pigments to weather the wheels and the Lowe itself.
For the first time I mixed the Mig pigments with a water and White glue mix so they would adhere and stay on the model for when it came to spraying the Matt coat.
I used Pro Modeller Dark Dirt wash instead of Artists oils and you can see the affect on the turret in one of the photos below. I also used Mig wash to make the oil and grease stains and rain marks.
I sprayed Polly Scale Matt coat to the Lowe before putting all the assembly's together and adding the tracks.
After I had put all together, I thought it looked dark so I thought I would dirty it up a bit more.
I used real mud that was broken down into a powder dust using a Mortar and pestle and applied it just like the pigments using the water and White glue mix.
I also used a lighter Brown Artist pastels to mix with the slightly darker earth and this had the affect of dry and damp mud. .
Another and final coat of Polly Scale Matt coat was sprayed to finish everything off.
The figure used are from Dragon and Tamiya and are shown with the Lowe to show the size of this beast.
I had fun building this model and would not object to building another in the future.
Martin
