Give me a long enough rope...

Well, I spent way too many hours of my day on this today. My day off and I did fiddly little bits, still, they came up pretty well, so I guess it was worth it!

Firstly I went over the woody bits with a highlight of Bestial Brown on all the edges to help it look less uniform.

I was still unhappy with the ropes, so looked at what other people had done. One idea I liked was to paint the smaller bits differently. I whacked bleached bone on them and got this hideous mess...

Fortunately good old Devlan Mud came back to the rescue and dulled them down a lot. Now it looks as though there are dirty ropes holding the howdah together, which I quite like.

The only part I don't like is the very edges, where there's no texture on the model (a bit of laziness on the modeller's part that I can forgive given how massive the whole Mumak is!)

Here's the view from the top as it currently stands. I also don't like the lack of detail on the front forks. I don't know if that's just because they've been painted over numerous times now or if they're naturally less textured, but they're pretty boring and flat.

Here's a closer look underneath, I've painted the buckles metallic to try and make them stand out a bit.

And I'm missing one strut on the second layer, so will have to think about what to do there, but if I just rest the other layers on top of the existing structure you can see how close I am to done!

Almost there! Unfortunately the top part was put together funny and doesn't line up, so I may have to greenstuff a bit to make it all work. Or just glue it anyway and hope it's not too noticeable! Just two small layers of howdah to go!