I was about to lay down the base colors when I realized Meng’s error in creating his base. Of course, it wouldn’t matter much if one assumes that we’ll cover everything with mud in a while anyway. Still, according to Meng, the idea is a bit strange if one believes that we’ll only paint the attached diorama.
It’s all about the tank’s tracks on the ground. The whole model is designed to run over sandbags laid in front of the trench, as they even have properly formed indentations. Meng designed imprinted marks along the entire hull, or rather underneath it, while the tank did not come from the air after all, right? So, the absence of these marks behind the tank is surprising.
I sculpted the traces of the tank tracks using Modellers World Clay
One of the reasons why I build models myself, rather than, for example, outsourcing the job to someone else, is that I want to test the products I design in real-life play. I think it’s one thing to test them on lab slides, scrap plastic models, or whatever, but it’s another to build a project you really care about. One that you put your heart and time into, and just as realistically, you will feel frustration if something goes wrong and your model doesn’t come out as expected. The level of satisfaction with the finished project will be the best determinant, much better than delegating this to external modelers and trusting their opinion, which will probably be insincere so as not to spoil the cooperation. With test work ourselves, too, we are subconsciously more likely to turn a blind eye to flaws because we don’t lose weeks of work when something is subtly different than it was supposed to come out. So, carefully building models on your products is the best way to get to know your stuff truly.
Clay is our newest release, and I’ll admit that I think it will be one of our main bestsellers. The product is used for sculpting and molding small or surface elements of dioramas, such as rocks, wooden branches, stones, or roads, but also for imprinting. Yes, imprinting anything is trivial because the product is non-sticky and keeps its shape better than plasticine while being just as soft when working. On the other hand, when it dries, it gets as hard as plaster, and you can still carve hard objects in it.
More about the product, of course, in the video to come. I’ve also created a tree branch that will be broken, sticking out from under the track of the FT-17 tank, but I’ll show them in the form of a PDF tutorial on how to paint a birch tree. I hope so because I have the idea, but whether it will work out for me, we’ll see 🙂
By the way, Nature Paints will also launch a wood set, the most versatile palette on the market, consisting of… five colors. Yes, five colors, from which you can mix any wood color you can think of. The whole concept and details are coming soon!