Over the past days I was also working on the Ka-Mi in parallel with the JSU, mostly adding weathering and balancing the contrast.

First I have airbrushed a very thin Flat Earth (Tamiya XF-52) along the bottom edge of the hull to simulate dusting. I have tried to keep the effect very muted and I think it looks quite good.

Afterwards I have realized that in the process of weathering I have a lot of the chipping I have done at the beginning, so decided to add bit more of the chips using both localized drybrushing and sponge technique.

I decided to play a bit with pigments as well – I have applied about 3 different shades on the vertical surfaces using Vietnam Earth, Africa Earth and Europe Dust. I applied only very little of the pigments – I have essentially drybrushed the pigments on the different areas and blown off the rest. The resulting effect was still high contrast between the areas with and without dust and very unnatural look. So I applied the oil thinner over the whole surface of the model and spread the pigments using a stippling motion of the brush. I have also removed some of the pigments from areas where I felt the effect is excessive.

Once the thinner dried, the look was much better, the contrast more realistic and the transition between dusted and clean areas very gradual. I might still add bit more of the pigments, primarily because some areas are still simply too clean.

The kit is now getting into the last weathering stages. I will still have to address the fact that the bottom of the model – namely the area behind the wheels and running gear is too clean, I haven’t applied any weathering there. This definitely does not look very natural…

UPDATE as of July 1, 2013: It has been almost year since the last post on this model and I  have decided to call it finished as I do not plan to be working on it, apart from using the model as a guinea pig for testing new things…

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