Esci/Italieri 20mm Valentine Tanks

 Hello There! Having started too many painting jobs making my painting table almost unusable I thought I had better finish something that was taking up a lot of space.

I had three of these finished, (probably in the 1990's!), and have had a number of other Valentines waiting to be dome! I have a regiments worth in he boxes but two of the three that I have completed recently, (the three in the front), have come from the 'assembled but broken' box.

All they needed was a couple of wheels drilling and pinning back into place and stripping the paint off. The paint was stripped off using 'Model strip' from Hannants in nearby Lowestoft and a bit of careful scrubbing with an old toothbrus. After that they just needed an airbrush primed and off we go!

I notice I have not put the transfers on this one but that will be done in the future. The tank commander is from AB, (always able to improve any model), and the aerial is a cat whisker.

The base is a 0.8mm thick plywood on a thin sheet of magnabase. The terrain is waterproof tile adhesive, Cotswold Buff chippings, gravel and sand sprinkled on a layer of PVA 

The vegetation is offcuts from a coconut hair brush and the rest is tufts. I use yellow ochre paint from an art shop as the main sand colour as I do not have to keep mixing a colour over and over again. It is then drybrushed with the same colours mixed with increasing amounts of white.

In the past I have played a number of games of Stuart Asquith's tank fighting rules. I hope to increase the number of tanks I have painted for a desert version of this game.