Well, I finally got the rhino done! It's been a bit of a mission but I've learnt a lot. The pics below are a bit close up (I did that to try and show the weathering detail) - it looks much more effective in natural light and not as zoomed in.
It looks alot better a bit further back (or is that just cheating?!):
Wierdly, I'm most happy with the back door of the tank - the weathered metal of the door and the tracks look the most realistic IMO:
And finally, with a couple of the tac squad marines I've been painting:
A bit of housekeeping: The rhino was also from ebay. It was quite pricey at £16, but it was ready assembled and undercoated (not brilliantly to be honest), but most importantly, had 'fist' forge world doors, which are dearer than that alone to buy new.
So a rhino is 35t pts plus 25 pts for a Hunter Killer Missile (I think, offhand)
Cost £16 plus £3 P&P
Running points total: 1471
Running spend total: £56.02
More as a record to help me than anything, I wanna pop a quick log here to record what I did and note my mistakes.
Undercoat was already done to an ok standard (bit of blobbing and the build wasn't great).
Basecoated Kantor blue and edged with ultramarine blue. Metal was done with Runefang Silver and the old Chainmail colour.
The red was a flat red from vallejo, which is a nice dull colour. The red on the seals was blood red. The paper on the seals was bestial brown with a bleached bone drybrush. The metal sections were done with a graphite pencil. The lens on the HK missile was Caliban green highlighted up with snot green and a white dot.
Just before the edging, I gave the whole think a black ink wash. The main reason I did it was because the marines have the wash on them and it darkens the blue, so I needed the tank to match, but looking back I should have done a much thinner glaze of the black and only really washed the big recesses. As it was, it pooled up and detracted from what was a smooth bascoat.
After that, I tired to do a technique that was on the GW website - basically, you take a 1cm x 1cm square of blister foam and dip it in black paint. Testing it on a bit of paper till you get the right amount of paint you can create a kind of random 'splatter' effect.
The guide recommended doing it with black and then going over it again with silver, with a bit of the black still showing above the silver to make it look like the paint has chipped to reveal undercoat and then metal.
Well, I made a right cock up of it. It looked terrible. Dan saw it at that stage but I didn't manage to take a pic of it. Part of the problem is that I think to be effective you need a lighter basecoat than dark blue - the one in the guide was Imperial Fists - the yellow contrasted really well. The other problem was lack of skill....
One useful technique though was sort of drybrushing silver with the foam over the sharp edges of the tank - it left an effective random scratch effect, especially if you pulled the foam the way the vehicle would be travelling. Looks best on the top of the front hatches and on the HK missile.
Anyway, so to cover over the majority of that cock up, I decided to crack out the Mig weathering pigments. I gave all around the lower quarter of the tank a helping of Russian Earth fixed with surgical spirit. Once I'd done, I thought it looked really good, but I made the mistake of choosing to use army painter matt spray on it to seal it. Big mistake as it ate all the pigment away! Back to square one!
This time round, I used two pigment colours, Russian Earth and Dried mud. I should have given a bit more thought and put the lighter colour higher up to represent dried mud and the darker at the lower extremities and tracks to represent fresh stuff.
At one stage it looked a right hotch potch - like bloody gravy, but hopefully it's recovered a bit. The majority of it is Russian Earth but the lower bits were RE mixed with Black Smoke dust. I also tried a bit of lighter mud on the from flaps, but I took most of it off as it looked too painted on.
More planning next time and thought about what colour would be best where.
I also used Black Smoke pigment on the exhausts. I was probably a bit too heavy on it and just slapped it on. Again more planning would have made it look more effective.
The thing I was pleased with was the tracks. I slapped in Russian Earth pigment and a little bit of Old Rust. When it dried I then got a graphite pencil and rubbed it on the raised edges of the track. It left a much deeper and more realistic metallic finish and made it looked like the tracks were caked with dirt except the bits that have a lot of contact. Much prefer it to just drybrushing silver tracks over black and it wasn't much slower.
In all, I think the main thing to learn is less is more. The tank is too busy and there's too much going on. It would have been far better to have, like Don did, a nice crisp finish with a couple of small weathered details as they then stand out more. Mine is too messy!
Also a bit more planning would have been beneficial - I just got gripped with inspiration from Don's tanks and just ploughed into it. More careful thought could have made it look better.
Things like the aerial for example - I just decided to pop that on in the end and it caused all kinds of problems. It may also have looked better weathered down itself a bit.
Next vehicle I do I may well try a bit more rust effect on it. I don't necessarily agree with Don that a marine tank in 40k wouldn't rust - who's to say what corrosive atmosphere the tank is fighting in? And besides, if we're going down the not rust route, you would think that 38,000 years in the future, they could manage to make paint that didn't chip at all!