Tamiya 1/35 Centurion Mk.III

I built this kit a while ago and it was a test bed for battle damage. The kit was one I got from an auction and it was old, with lots of ejection-pin marks, but thankfully they were all on the inside. I used a soldering iron (not a hot one) to melt the plastic to look like various dents and bullet holes. It was very effective but at first I thought I had over done it. When I put on the paint, the look of the damage was toned down some and then when I slathered the model in pigments that my friend had given me it was exactly the way I wanted it to look. I also made a mud mixture from a recipe in Finescale Modeler and it was glorious. I will use it on all of my tanks now. But I forgot to put on the decals before the mud! Agggghhh! Luckily the mud had not covered many decal spots so I just scraped it off, laid down some future and everything was alright. I also coated the bottom half of the tank with future to make it look like it was just coming out of a river. The white cotton that you see is smoke from the smoke dispensers. The tank sat on my shelf for a while, but I don't like my models sitting alone and usually build a diorama with each one. I was between building models and I thought this would be a good time to make this tank look spectacular. I made the base from styrofoam covered with plaster-cloth. I then painted it with oil colors and started putting on all the brush and grass. The figures are, believe it or not, toy plastic army men! I cut off the base then took all the molding lines off an painted them to look like real figures. The grass and low ground cover are Woodland Scenic, but the trees are weeds with the tops cut off and the roots covered with grass posing as leaves! They originally for our model railroad then I thought that they would make perfect brush for a South Korean landscape. So I finished this and everybody who comes to my house remarks on it. I hope all of you like it.

Nate Kiker

7 additional images. Click to enlarge.