The trickiest work here looks to be the fine detail at small scale: rivets, vision ports and engine deck bolts all needed hand-painting with a diluted mix, and the tank name had to sit crisp on curved armor. Sergio Solo handled it patiently, cutting a custom paper stencil for the VANILLA lettering, taping it in place and airbrushing Deep Yellow through it, then tidying the letter edges with a hobby knife. A steady hand with a brush on every tiny fitting rounds that out.
The finish goes on in layered steps. A coat of UMP Black Primer covered the body, track runs and detached exhaust pipe, then a hairspray layer went over the top to enable chipping. The base color was mixed from 75% Khaki and 25% Medium Olive and airbrushed with subtle modulation for highlights and shadows. Masked sections of the front hull and track horns were sprayed white and Carmine Red for the recognition bands, later chipped with a wooden toothpick and water, and a gloss coat went down before decaling.
Plenty of small touches stand out. A B/6 decal was flipped upside down to read B/9 beside serial number A592, sealed with Micro Sol, which strikes me as a lovely bit of improvisation! The exhaust was wrapped in white sewing thread fixed with cyanoacrylate glue, and loose fuzz was singed away with a lit match before the pipe was reattached. A 4B graphite pencil brought out metallic edge highlights and track wear, a blend of 20% PVA glue and water topped with fine sand builds dried mud on the lower sponsons, and black pigment near the exhaust and engine areas reads as soot.
One thing stays unresolved. The rear marking reads A352 in the images, yet the serial A592 is also attached to that marking, and which figure actually ended up on the finished tank remains unclear.
Project by Sergio Solo. Watch it on their YouTube channel: