I've been thinking about how to best apply a very thick heavy mud on AFVs for some time. Vallejo has just come out with a product called “Mud” and I think it would do very well. But as I looked at their adverts and considered Vallejo's heritage as an art supply company (still it's largest part) I thought I'd take a second look at some of the coarsened gels I've picked up and see if the effect wasn't similar and at a price of about 1/5 of the specialized brews.
I'm thinking of a very thick and wet mud. It's worth considering that AFVs would have operated in very muddy environments in all theaters of war (Tunisia and Italy were very bad if you don't equate mud with those areas) at least twice a year – more often in Asia. When things got really bad, “General Mud” could bring operations to a halt. But in the winter of 1943-44 both the Russians the the allies in Italy fought through through most the season mud or no. Below are Tigers in Russia, a Canadian Sherman in Italy and a US Jeep in the Phillippines -
I haven't had good luck with heavy mud in the past inspired by the idea of emulating Vallejo (Tamiya makes a textured paint likewise) I mixed some “Black Lava Texture Gel” from Windsor/Newton Galleria ($7 for 250 ml at Blick's) with some heavy Galeria Raw Umber artist acrylics, some sand and some Liquitex Gloss Medium. It took about 60 seconds and here's the front end of my medical experiment PZ II:
Obviously you could change the color by using different paint and the gloss by adding satin or even matte medium if you wanted a dense dry mud. And the stuff would take very well to dry brushing because it's so coarse. (Less coarse, leave out the sand, more coarse add more.) All the art paint suppliers make this stuff (most is untextured but varies greatly in viscosity) and diorama wizards are no doubt familiar with it. Here's the range from Galleria:
Below is the URL for a video showing how to employ Golden (my favorite brand in art supplies) textured gels:
http://www.goldenpaints.com/VIDEO/library.php?ID=52
Better modelers no doubt can have superior techniques, but I think this stuff works pretty well – I'd think there's promise to at least equal the pigment/plaster/resin/sand brews encouraged by MIG or AK. And $15 would get you a lifetime supply.
PS: I've continued to futz with the basic mixture above varying the colors and viscosity. The other efforts were not as successful as the first for wet mud. However, I made a brew with matte medium and then over painted it with Ranger “Distress Crackle Paint” to see whether something like this might not work for thick dried mud. Keep in mind these are one-off medical experiments and could presumably be improved with some effort. (I would certainly have applied less glop for dry mud.) But the crackle stuff does crackle the surface okay, and evokes memories of my times in Minnesota where a pounding rain could turn an area into a swamp and the following 99 degree sun dries it out – and it's crackled. Ranger paint was pretty pricey but checking the Blick web site there are craft equivalents available for $2 and redoubtable Golden makes a “crackle gel” for $11 – for enough to crackle Idaho. And Vallejo has a “Crackle Medium” for whatever you pay for Model Color/Air.
Eric
