 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today, we're gonna paint, well, a tank. But, for a very interesting reason. Let's get into it. Uh, the strict technomancer that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci V. So if you followed along this channel, you may know that Uncle Adam and I, well, we release games. And we've released three games before, Rain and Hell, Space Station Zero, and Majestic 13. We're gonna add to our yearly releases with a new Xen. A simple digital release that contains both a small minigame and updates, additions, and additional content for our previous games. Our first edition here is called Snarl. Our Xen has supplementary information for Rain and Hell, as well as Space Station Zero, and importantly, has a brand new game in it. A minigame called Tanks for the Apocalypse. It is a skirmish game that you can play with your friends, where you each pilot a tank around in the post-apocalyptic 19-something, question mark wasteland of the United States. And everybody basically is driving around beat-up, kit-bashed M4 Sherman tanks. So today we're gonna paint an M4 Sherman, and we're gonna do this one pretty standard, as though it was more or less ready to be shipped out and is now worn and weathered in the post-apocalypse and has seen better days. So we're gonna go through painting this thing, how we resolve more historical style painting, basically. We're gonna be a little more subdued, use lots of weathering techniques and stuff like that. So this one's gonna be a lot of crunchy fun. Let's head over the desk and let's get into it. Alright, let's paint a tank. We've got to get ready for tanks for the apocalypse. So we're gonna start with this nice dark green. It's a really nice military green color. We're gonna be using the airbrush for these initial coats. This is really the purpose the airbrush was designed for in manager painting. We've got these big, large, flat surfaces. We're just gonna apply a nice even coat over the whole thing. Now, if you don't happen to have an airbrush, don't sweat it. You can just use a large, flat brush, something we don't normally use in manager painting, like the biggest, flattest brush you can. And you can often accomplish the same thing just by thinning the paint down and running it along there. But once I get a pretty nice base coat, I'm ready to go. Then I'm gonna step up to olive green. Now, this is quite a jump, but we're going to do a directional lighting scheme here. Something fairly realistic. So we're gonna only shoot from this one direction with just like, I'm gonna somewhat adjust because like the barrel is in the way and stuff like that. So I've got to adjust a little bit. But for the most part, you'll notice I'm shooting towards the front of the tank. Now, I'm not worried if I over highlight a little bit as you'll see me hit like the turret and it will be pretty bright from the over spray. That's okay. We're gonna flatten this out the next one. But we want to push that light towards effectively the front of all the panels. We're not highlighting each individual panel. We're highlighting the tank as a singular volume, but then making sure that that light is pushed towards those forward upward facing areas. But we're spreading out just little bits of it. We're operating really thin with these. So this is about three drops of thinner to one drop of paint here. Just to make sure we get a nice thin even application. Once we've got that, then we'll put the two together thin it way down. So this is five drops of thinner to one drop paint. And then I'm going to come back in in the opposite direction and work up. And I use this to soften some of the olive green. You'll notice once it dried, it already softened quite a bit there. It's not near as bright as when it was sort of fresh and wet. That's the thing with a lot of these greens. They do dull quite a bit as they dry out. So don't worry if your initial colors seem a little bright. But I'm just going to use this to kind of smooth the transition and make those colors a little softer. Now I'm going to take my olive green and mix in just a little bit of green sky. And we're going to use that to do some edge highlighting. Now we're not going to go over the top here. This is admittedly, you know, a little bit more of a fantasy technique. But edges do catch some amount of light, especially on tanks, which do tend to have some amount of satin to some of the paint. The World War II paints for some of these tanks were a little bit satin. So we're just going to hit the upward-facing angles mostly for these edges. So we're not edge highlighting everything. This isn't really like we're not trying to go GW heavy metal style here. But where there is an edge where it's quite clear and where it's upward-facing or we're catching some amount of light, we'll hit it with a little dab of that edge highlight. And you know, the nice part about this is just as with all the other greens, it will it will dull down and become quite minimal. We'll also dirty it up a little in later steps. But I do find this to be still an important step. We want to be thin. You see I'm using the side of the brush. I have very thin paint here. So it just wicks right off the brush onto the onto the tank. But you know, it just creates more alternations of light and dark. And these kinds of edges, especially even if it's just these upward-facing ones, will just increase the readability of the overall miniature as it creates more edges that your eyes can recognize. Once that's done, we're just going to take and start picking out a few of the details. This tank has little things attached to its hull like the shovel to get it unstuck and axes to get rid of tree chunks and stuff like that. So you know, those halves are going to get turned brown. I'm also going to turn the sandbags here that are above that. Those are little additional sandbags that I added onto the tank. When looking at the, I was looking at a lot of reference pictures of these tanks. I noticed that they often had extra sort of things attached, you know, either up armored or that the crew would attach other stuff to it, assumingly for, you know, utilities uses as it was in the field. But I want to turn these sandbags brown so we can eventually turn them white. We want sort of a brown color in between that. We want to pull out that rough texture. Then we're going to go ahead and get out our rubber black, one of my favorite colors from AK. I'm just going to black out some of these little details just to make sure that it's nice and edged. They'll end up being metallic in the end, but I want to cover them completely in black so there's a nice little edge and shadow there over the thing. We'll do the same with the gun barrels. I also do the same with the little mini gun barrels on this thing, not the full gun barrel. In looking at reference photos of these tanks, they were mostly just this green, like other than the spray paint that's on the side, which we'll do later as decals, you know, and realistically the treads themselves. These things were basically just spray painted green. I assume they just like power spray this entire thing. Now we're going to use some Tamiya panel liner. I love this stuff for things like tanks and historical vehicles. It's really nice. As you can see, it's like unbelievably great and how fast it flows. It flows just like an oil wash, but it dries in a few seconds. Well, that might be a little fast. It dries in a few minutes. That's about 10 minutes. This is completely dry. You can still clean it up with a Q-tip and white spirits if you need to. So, you know, it will run and kind of flower out. But basically I'm hitting any recessed areas here to reinforce any panels or anything like that. This tank does not have a ton of panels, which is historically accurate. There is several different models of Sherman tank, but some of the most common, the whole was basically sort of crafted as one very solid big piece and then sat down on its frame. So we just hit all these places where there'd be shadows, let the panel liner spread out and do its work and give us those nice resets. If you're interested in tanks for the apocalypse or snarl the zine, the supplementary information for rain and hell and space station zero and all of that, you can get the whole zine for only $8. It contains the full game, which can be played by two to 10 players. It's everything you need. Well, except the tank for only eight bucks. So it's quite a deal. You can find the link for that down below. I've also got a video going up today that's all about how to play the game. So if you're curious and you want to see this tank in action, I've got a battle report featuring this tank. So check that out as well. All right. So that panel liner is all dry. I cleaned it up and wiped it up wherever it was wherever necessary. You'll notice it leaves a little bit of like somewhat staining. There's going to be finish variances here, but it doesn't really matter because we're going to varnish this whole thing. So we'll bring it all in line. Now I'm just really like rough dry brushing some white over those things and we're good to go. Once the sandbags are ready, it's time to move on to decals. And for that, we get out our micro set. That's what I'm wiping on here right now. And then we watch and laugh as Vince attempts to apply a decal on camera while holding this tank within the area of focus in a very small space. This is not an easy thing to do. And I nearly screwed it up and then at miracle at the last moment I pulled it out. So yeah, just apply the micro set quite thickly to the area. And then after letting the decal soak in water, we just stick it right on there. I made my way around. I did a second layer of micro set over every decal. Let that dry. Then I get out the micro sol as the second step. Some people don't believe in micro sol. I really, really do. I think this stuff does magic. Micro sol softens the decal and really works it into the body in just ways that I... It just otherwise doesn't. I don't know how to explain it. But I put two coats of the micro sol on every decal, letting it dry in between each application. Once that's done, we're then going to varnish the whole thing with a little mix of gloss varnish and for body and then ultra matte to matte it out. So that's two drops of gloss varnish to six drops of ultra matte. And then I just go ahead and apply two simple coats of that varnish to the tank to even it all out. Now we need to scuff this bad boy up. Thus begins the weathering phase. So we're going to start by sort of knocking around some of these decals and integrating them more. So here I have a mix of the dark green and the olive green. And rather with rather thick paint, like I don't have much water in here at all, I am just dabbing little dots and scratches and hashes and such into various points on the decals. So you can see I'll cut in from the outside. I'll make little scratches across the surface. I'll basically just... And you want to work darker than the area that's around it because you will never get it to match exactly and it won't matter a bit. But it does need to completely cover the lighter color decal. That's what's important. And so you want to work a little darker than the surrounding mid-tone and it's so small it will blend into the eye. People will not be able to tell. Do not worry about it matching exactly. It will be fine. Just make it darker, make it opaque so it covers the decal. It will look like it's a chip out of it. Now we're doing some classic sponge weathering. This is just a torn up piece of clamshell sponge. And then dipped in a little bit of rhinox hide and wiped off a lot. The important part about this is to wipe, wipe, wipe, wipe, wipe so much of this away and just then dab it, dab it, dab it around. You've got to dab it a lot, a lot, a lot. It's always better to start with lighter dots, more random dots and then just build it up, build it up, build it up. Then we're going to go in with a brush and we're just going to reinforce some of that sponge weathering. The sponge weathering will produce very random patterns and you want to focus your dabbing in the places where there would naturally be damage occurring. So you shouldn't evenly disperse your sponge weathering over the entire surface of the tank. That's not realistic. This tank would be hit and chipped more in certain areas. Edges, the front of the tank, wherever the wheel wells are going to kick up rocks, so like wherever it would naturally scrape against things, the front of the armor, all of those things that are more likely to come into contact with foreign objects are more likely to be scratched and so we're going to reinforce that here and create more actual lines with the scratches. You'll see me trace these lines, but they're staccato. They're little stipples of lines where we're just extending out and drawing out the feeling that something big hit here. So once I have some lines and chips worked into the whole thing, I'm then going to go ahead and apply some simple streaks. I'm actually going to use contrast paint for this. You can use oil paints or enamels or 100 different things, but good old fashioned simple acrylic contrast paints dry pretty fast. If you water them down or use a contrast medium or anything like that, you can thin them way out and create different thicknesses and such of the streaks, but just a super thin brush, some fresh contrast paint. We are focusing the streaks on originating from wherever the heaviest chips and rust and dings are in the paint, as well as on edges or places where water would naturally gather and then run and streak down. So if there's any place that would be a natural water catch like where two metal joints meet, that's where we put a streak. It's also important to streak over top of the decals as that will further integrate them into the tank and make them feel like they're part of it and not a decal sitting on top. You'll see I have lots of streaks running over top. That combined with the damage combined with the varnish makes them feel like they're really part of the just natural paint that's on the tank. Once that's all done, it's time to get in there and get some dirt on these here tracks. So we're going to use a sort of red-brown kind of thing. Tanks for the apocalypse features a post-apocalyptic burnt earth setting due to a mishap with the first nuclear bomb that goes off. And so we're going to work in this red-brown earth all throughout the lower parts of the tracks. I'm then just going to take a clean brush with water. Now it's sort of bubbly because my paint cup water has little drops of flow improvement like soap and so that kind of will move it around. That's actually only helpful to us. It doesn't just pop and dry. It's no big deal. But I use the water to just spread it around and then I reinforce again once it's spread around into that space. So the water helps it run and seep into all the recesses and then I use a second coat to sort of apply it more strongly down in the very like bottom bases of the treads. I also take a more light brown pigment. So this is not the red of the earth, it's lighter, more brown, more dirt, dust, debris, detritus. And I just sort of randomly dabbed that around in just a few places on the top of the tank where I think dirt might naturally gather. So again, where two areas meet such as the side of this that was way too heavy but it's okay. It's dry pigment. I just wipe it off later. Basically anywhere where I think there might be some water that would gather and then when it dried it left behind some staining and dirt. It's a great way to create this sort of effect and create more tonal variation across the surface of the tank. With that all done, I gave it a quick varnish one more time just to lock all of the pigment in and now it's on to the metallic paint. So we won't varnish again after this step. And this is just a quick application of Vallejo Metal Color Steel through the brush. Nothing too big here. There's not many elements on this thing that stick out. I end up doing the little antenna in steel just for some kind of variance rather than being in the green. I don't know if this was traditionally actually green but it seemed like a fun little thing to turn metallic. I also turned this very small gun barrels metal. The large gun barrel was definitely still green in all the reference photos that I saw but I figured the little guns are meant to be like little guns sticking out and so of the portals that they very well might have a metallic color to them. We want to dull them down a little so just some quick applications of Null Noil onto sort of the back of the metallic parts and the bottom of the antenna just to add a little bit of tonal variation. Nothing too big. You know, same thing with the shovels and the metal parts just to separate the elements. Create a little bit of just visual movement on there. Again, we're being very minimal but with that last step applied that tank is ready to go. There we go. Our tank is all ready to roll. We'll say this is my good guy tank. I'm doing a couple of them and as I mentioned you can see in the battle report if you want to understand how the game plays. Adam also has a video on his channel with some very brief explanations and overview of the new game. The new game is a little more than 20 pages. It has everything you need for 2 to 10 players to sit down and have a quick, fun, really, really explosive game of tanks for the apocalypse. So are you going to be a good guy or a bad guy? That's for you to decide. But either way, thank you so much for watching this. I really appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed this and it gave you some ideas for painting up your own vehicles whether they be for tanks for the apocalypse or for any vehicle you have me painting for any game. If you liked this, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating. We have new videos here every Saturday. If you want to support the channel, hey, you could go down and maybe pick up that zine and get a new game and supplementary information for the previous two games. If you don't have those, well, you can find those too on our website. All of that is linked down below. If you want to support the channel in other ways, there's a merch store down there. There's links to Amazon where you can pick up your hobby supplies. It doesn't cost you anything extra but gives a nice kickback to the channel. And of course, if you want to go all the way, there is a Patreon down there focused on review and feedback and taking your next step on your hobby journey. We'd love to have you as part of the community. As always though, I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time.