The IG get some armor

I was at the FLGS last weekend and there were a couple of cheap Russes in the the consignment case.  My slowly accumulating IG army was completely lacking in anything for the heavy slots so I thought this would be an excuse to add something.  I chose the better looking of the two and took it home for an appointment with some Simple Green.

Well, those weren't regular paints on it.  I'm used to the paints flaking off after 24hours in the Simple Green.  This time though the paint instead went to mush and took a lot of time to remove with a toothbrush.  And that was the topcoat.  The primer stayed in place, and I was starting to realize the funny surface on parts of this model were from the primer being way over applied.  Detail was completely lost in some places. Add to that the large amounts of battle damage that I hadn't noticed in the store and things aren't looking too great.  Still, it was cheap.  Photo below is the nasty layer of crap left after 48hours of simple green, a toothbrush and a file.

I had the model down to the funky looking primer, busted off the sponsons, some accessories, and some of the extra armor, replaced the lascannon with a heavy bolter, and repaired some of the battle damage.  Now I'm down to a basic LR BT but its still kind of funky looking.  In the end I decided I'd just go heavy on the dirt/grime look.  I went with the same gray (fortress over adeptus) I used on one of the sentinals, then put a lot of fairly thick wash over it.  Once that was dry I broke out the SecretWeapon pigments to dirty it up more.  Exhaust black on vents, exhausts and weapons, iron oxide (watered down) all over the place and then terracotta earth and metallic iron (from the treads tutorial I'd been wanting to try) on the treads.  All looks good.  The yellow panel on the side of the turret is where unit decals will go.

Until I sealed it.  I was pretty gentle this time but I still seem to have lost pigments in some areas.  I'll redo those and respray afterwards.  The thing that really seemed to vanish was the metallic iron.  Second shot shows some of the rusting, as well as the nasty bobbly surface of the tank.