Matilda Mk. II – Photo gallery
The 16th model I completed, built from November 2015 to March 2016, represents a British infantry tank Matilda Mk II, used during the Second World War. It caught my attention mainly due to its unique camouflage pattern.
The Tamiya kit (no. MM124) is quite old, dating back to 1973. Nonetheless it is of good quality, with few visible flashes and ejection pin marks. In the box I found four sprues with the pieces and the lower hull, all in sand colored styrene. There were also a pair of black vinyl tracks, a decal sheet and two instruction manuals, one in English, the other in Japanese. In addition, there was also a figure, but I left it out.
I decided to build everything out of the box, except for the main gun barrel, which I replaced with a turned aluminium one, produced by RB Models (model no. 35B02).
The assembling phase has been quick. I had only to fill some gaps between the fenders and the side skirts. For the same reason, moreover, I had to mount the tracks first, instead of putting them after the painting.
Painting
In the North African theatre Matildas used a camouflage pattern called "Dazzle", inspired by naval ones. It served for disrupting the vehicle silhouette, rather than concealing it, thus preventing a correct estimate of the range by the enemy gunners and making the targeting less precise. The schema which I took inspiration from can be found here.
Since it's a solid edges schema, I used some masking tape to cover the zones of a color before applying the following one. The paints —sprayed with an airbrush and adjusted with a paintbrush— are sand, slate grey and light grey (with a slight greenish hue). You can see the painting steps in the following photos.
Photo gallery
After the base painting I performed several detailing and weathering steps, such as decals, scratches, washes, filters, dry brush and dust effects.
