[rockpaperscissor]

Thank you for your interest, Tappi. I can explain my approach and supply some details of how I work with Photoshop, but unless you have Photoshop yourself, the information will be of limited use to you, I'm afraid.

I think my years as a painter of military miniatures influenced my approach to coloring/texturing paper models. In that hobby, we imagine a light source (usually coming from above), that determines where we paint highlights and shadows onto the figure for a more realistic scale appearance. Scale modeling is akin to looking at a subject from a distance, so details have to be accentuated or they will be lost. This is why stage actors wear such garish makeup. It looks ridiculous up close, but from the viewpoint of the audience it looks "scale" correct. Without it, the actor's face would appear as a flesh-colored featureless blob. At 1/1 scale, the highlights and shadows provided by natural light is scale correct. The further away an object is from the viewer, i.e. the smaller the scale, the more garish the details need to be in order to appear correct.

When I color/texture a tank model, I imagine a light source coming from above and a bit to the front - say 11 o'clock. Anything that protrudes from the surface - a rivet for example, would have a highlight on its topside/frontside and a shadow on the underside/backside. This 3D approach offers far more realism than the commonly used open circle/donut or black dot. I handle panel lines in the same way. A black line indicates the juncture of 2 panels. Since I assume a light source from above and to the front, a highlight line drawn directly behind the black line provides a more realistic scale appearance. I handle cylinders (gun barrel, fuel tank, etc) the same way. When I edge paint layered items such as hatches, I take the light direction into account, and paint the edges that face the light source with highlight color, and the edges that face away much darker, often black. I usually surround layered parts with halo of shadow to make them pop.

The way I draw 3D rivets in Photoshop is to select the brush tool and select a hard edge size that I like. Then I go to the brushes menu and select brush tip shape which allows me to establish spacing of the black dots. Once I've established a dot spacing that I like, I place my first dot at the beginning of the row, hold down the shift key, and place the cursor where I want the last dot in the row to be, and hit enter. Voila, a row of black dots appears. After all the rivets are in place, I select them all and using either the brush or eraser tool paint a highlight individually on each rivet. It's important to visualize what the part will look like when assembled so the highlight color is painted onto the correct side of the rivet. This is labor intensive, and I'm very sure there are more efficient ways in the program to accomplish this task.

Let me say, despite using Photoshop for years, my knowledge of the program is rudimentary. I would rather build models that spend time exploring the capabilites of the program or learning new design software. I know enough to get by - barely. There are functions like emboss that, after a light direction is established, would automatically render uniform highlights and shadows to the entire page to make the parts more 3D in appearance. But...once the part is cut out and folded, the software placed highlights/shadows may be on the wrong side of the 11 o'clock light source. I've seen this phenomenon in some published models: on one side of the model, we have the appearance of 3D protruding rivets, and on the other side it appears that the rivets are recessed because the highlights/shadows are oriented upside down to the 11 o'clock light source.

Attached is my final development of the hull. I've added the parts that are to be layered, as well as a muffler. Assuming that the tank had mufflers, it's unknown where it/they were located. Both the resin models place a single muffler on the right side of the tank, so I went along with conventional wisdom. To make the muffler, I selected a diameter and length that looked about right. I multiplied this diameter by 3.14 to determine the width needed to wrap around the end pieces. I then painted a shadowed area on the hull where the muffler will be placed.

I'm going to start building the hull next. I'll post a few photos of the completed subassembly and describe any problems that I encountered along the way. I don't anticipate any, but you never know.