The Apocalypse Tank you see on screen in RA2 is mostly a light grey with red bits. Not hugely realistic, although grey hues have been used on tanks over the years.
Border model have gone for a more realistic color- mostly green and black with some bits in red and grey.
What I want to do is aim for a kind of kid-point between those two approaches- remaining fairly faithful to the game but adding a little realism too.
For this approach it was good to get a look at the tank in the video game’s FMV sequences- namely in the intro video where there are three shots of it.
A remastered 4K version of the video played at 0.25 speed gave me plenty of time to see some detail.
The main points from doing this was seeing that the color is a mottled grey and the red bits on the turret are confined to a stripe.
My inspiration came from a few sources. One was this urban pattern of camo that I’m sure most of you have seen.
(And if not go immediately and watch a Sabaton music vid!)
Looking at some color scenes on Russian tanks and vehicles also helped, notably the scheme pictured below which has a kind of duck egg blue color in it. I found a T-80UD color instruction sheet on scalemates that had this scheme and that helped me map out the camo a bit.
Another bit of inspiration was remembering a thread from while ago where @Mrclark7 used hydrodipping on an M1 Abrams kit in this thread.
Mig AMMO colors were my choice for this with Light Ghost Grey, FS36293 and Dark Grey AMT-12 being the chosen three tones.
That was the easy part. Border have no color/markings guide in the box- having the usual front/sides/rear/top you find in most kits these days would have been nice as I could have drawn my scheme over it, helping me plan it.
As it was there is a top view on the red back page of the instructions which I did a bit of doodling on for a rough idea and then just got out the silly putty/panzer putty and got down to business.
As it stands now there are a few areas to tidy and finesse. There is also a decent amount of detail painting to be done. And that is not including the various other sub-assemblies in various stages of painting. So progress is definitely a bit slow at the minute!
Thanks for reading.