Toddler issues

Having Children can be s wonderful and enjoyable experience, most of the time any way. Sometimes however, it is less enjoyable, like when they "make your tank beautiful"

Beautiful tank, after the worse and still wet paint has been removed!

Paint everywhere!

So, you can image my surprise following my littlest in to his bedroom to find my prized super heavy sitting on the floor, covered in yellow and red paint. While I was busy washing the still wet red paint off, my wife was more concerned with the paint on the carpet, which to be fair probably was a more pressing issue.
Luckily I have varnished this tank, although it was with GW's spray varnish, so I'm not sure how it will react when I try and clean the paint off. Being kids paints the easiest way of removing the paint it to wet it and then scrape it off, as it becomes soft. This was done by placing paper kitchen towels all over it and soaking them with water. After leasing it for several hours, I started scraping the paint off with a bamboo skewer, chopping every so often to keep a sharp-ish point on it. 

After a few hours work in front of the TV, the results are not to bad, not perfect but not bad.

As clean and tidy as can be

Some remnants still visible

Hard to remove paint

Some areas, especially the hard to reach ones like the engine and in the gaps between the various hatches and panels, paint is still visible and also around all the rivets, while not hard to remove, were very tedious. I probably could have done more by soaking the whole thing under water but the varnish and paint held up very well with this technique and I didn't want to push things and ruin the whole thing! As far as I'm concerned, it's back to a usable condition, so I'm happy.

Still handless!

The only other issue is that the commander is now missing a hand! He originally had his pistol out but it's disappeared somewhere in my son's room and I cannot find it, it's most likely be sucked up by the hoover and binned.

I think we have moved past the painting daddy's models stage as we're quite happy painting every spare model that can be found, usually blue, red or green and occasionally yellow, even though he has a whole tub full of paint pots collected from various craft activities in a whole range of colours more extensive than my own paint collection!