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Tiny ASU -57

colours and markings

Since I served in the 82nd Airborne for about 4 years, I had to build this little guy and put him in ABN markings. I went with a dark green, but after looking at pictures of the real deal, it didn’t look dark enough. I added a black wash over everything and it worked pretty well to darken things up. The decals consist of markings for 2 Russian Airborne Units, (Unknown) and an Egyptian vehicle. I can’t read Russian or Egyptian so it is anybody’s guess as to what unit the markings represent. I do know that there are markings for a May Day parade vehicle included as well. The weathering and paint chipping was kept to a minimum as I didn’t feel the need to go hog-wild with it. A light dusting with some light tan along the road wheels and lower hull finished off the painting.

base and figure

The base is part of a cedar award blank that I had left over from a previous project. I sawed one end off of it, and gave the two bare ends a coat of polyurethane to help keep out the moisture from the cellu-clay ground work. I normally use a sanded tile grout for my ground work, but decided to use the cellu-clay instead as it would be a quick piece of work. I mixed up some orange, yellow, and black tube acrylics from Liquitex until I had a nice dark brown color. I added this and some Elmer’s white glue to the cellu-clay. Once I had a good paste I spread it across the base. While still tacky, I sprinkled on some static grass and pressed in my track marks.
I think the tiny base lends to the overall size of the finished piece. I let this dry over night and all day while I was at work. I then broke out the airbrush and applied a nice dark brown color over the already dark brown ground work. Mixing up some greens, yellows, and white I dry brushed this across the grass to bring it out a little better. The plants are from the dried flower section of Michaels that were bought about 4 years ago and are still like new. Small holes were drilled into the base and the plants were added with a small drop of white flue on their stems and pushed into the holes. The figure is from the early release of Dragon’s tank soldiers. Whether or not the uniform is right for the time period I don’t know, I just wanted to add a figure to show how tiny this vehicle was for these guys to operate. I just used the Dragon box art as my painting guide. I really need to get back into some figures as this guys isn’t all that great to me. Oh well, all the more reason to practice. He was painted using acrylics as a base and oils for the highlights and shadows.

in conclusion

While this kit isn’t even close to what is hitting the market today, i.e. DML/Tamiya, it will build into a cool little kit of a not so often seen anti-tank vehicle. There are a couple of after market sets out there for this kit as well. One is from Eduard and is part number 35734. The others are an aluminum barrel from Model Point, part number 3529, and some return rollers which are part number 3550. Last but not least is another detail set from Xacto. I’m not sure what it includes as this is a new release, and no number is listed for it as yet. I found all of these on Greatmodels.com. I’m sure they will really dress up this little guy. I have another one of these kits on my shelf and definitely plan on adding these sets to it when I build it. I hope I have shed some light on this kit and what can be done with it. Thanks for looking.