Armour Painting: Stormblade Pt. IV

Greetings!

I "finished" the Stormblade a few weeks ago. "Finished", because I find something from time to time I want to repaint or try to make it a little bit better, so it is not 100% done...but almost.
It took me a while to make presentable photos, since the camera flash blurred out the details. But I made something around of 150 photos this evening to get the best my camera is able to produce.
But enough of that, here are the pics!








The weathering was not that difficult. I learned not to use too much of weathering powders while I painted the leman russ and so I built up several layers of thinned weathering powders. I used different mixtures of dark mud, russian earth and african earth from mig and thinned that with thinner for washes. When that was dry it turned out to be somewhat too bright and "brownish". Another layer of dark mud/russian earth darkened that down a bit. I concentrated the weathering with the powders on the lower parts of the tank and only put a little bit on the upper parts where dust would collect.
For leaking fuel and oil I aibrushed more thinned brown ink on the fuel drums and surroundings and on some of the rivets (see lower pic).
I made the mud from acrylic resin, sand and different weathering powders thinned with a little bit of water. Mainly I flicked it on from a brush by hand (gloves come in handy!) and some spots I made by airbushing on the brush. That flicks on some really nice and naturally looking spots (lower pic as well).
For the exhaust shroudings I added some more details by using thinned baal red wash, leviathan purple wash and a bit of asurmen blue wash (all from GW) on the lower parts and some very thin layers of a selfmade yellow wash (sunburst yellow thinned with water and matt varnish) on the upper part. The lowest part of the exhausts were weathered with rust coloured weathering powders.
The heavy stubber on the pintle was simply drybrushed with pencil lead/graphite with my finger. (Simple and effective, that's really a cool hint in the imperial armour model masterclass).
The chipped paint effects where done by sponging on charadon granite (GW foundation paint). That colour is very nice and sponging is fun. You really have to pay attention that you don't go over top with it and chip the whole tank. As sponge I used the small "sponge" in the GW blister packs.
One thing I have I learned now as the tank is 99% done: On the next (super heavy) tank (whenever that might be) I will paint the tracks before I glue them on! That would make painting the running gear and the tracks themselves a lot easier. Actually that took me long hours and I couldn't reach all parts.

So that brings me to the end of this small painting log and I have to say, I enjoyed it really much and I learned a lot. And that is definitely not the last super heavy I will paint!