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Here is a kit I completed a few months ago. It's the Dragon Stug IV Early. It's the first kit I've completed with photoetch. It's the last thing I used an airbrush on.
The zimmerit is Tamiya putty shaped using a carved piece of sprue. The kit went together fairly well, except for two things. This is one of the kits DML marketed with thin clear plastic for the side skirts. These are nice and thin, but the plastic has to be glued with super glue. There are holes in the skirt sections, and the mounting brackets stick through these. Puttying up these skirts to fix this was a pain, but the end result was nice. Second, the fit of the fighting compartment roof to the front of the fighting compartment was not great. I didn't feel like puttying, then sanding, then dealing with replacing the detail I would have wrecked. So I put a tarp over the front of the fighting compartment. I've seen many pictures of StugIII with tarps. My guess is leaks were common around the gun mount.
Otherwise the kit went together well. This is one of the older PzIV kits from DML, so the rear hull plate has knock out pin marks to fill, but adding zimmerit took care of that.
The skirts were painted to resemble some I'd seen in the Squadron Stug III book. The kit was given an overall base coat of Tamiya Dark Yellow, then I used green and brown with the airbrush all over it. I hate airbrushing, so I got rid of it, and the rest of the kit was done with paintbrush and chalk pastels. I weathered it fairly heavily with dust and dirt. I put some of the groundwork on the kit to simulate accumulations of mud and dirt.
I used Rob Plas' dirt/water/white glue mix for the groundwork. The base is an old plaque I picked up at a garage sale. I sifted the dirt (from our yard) using an old flour sifter (I even had permission from my wife!!), and that evened out the texture of the dirt mix a lot. The groundwork was mixed together (too much water on my first attempt) then slopped on the base. I put down two layers of the mix, allowing the first to dry overnight. After applying the second layer I pressed some tread marks in the dirt, and then fixed the Stug in place on the dirt. You can pick up the tank and base by the Stug if you so desire, it's locked into the dirt. I applied large quantities of chalk pastels to the Stug and the base to blend them in.
This was a fun kit to build. I recommend it if you can find one.
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