Painting of the first Soviet begun

Still not the triumphant post I wished to make in which I gladly proclaimed all 20-odd miniatures painted, unfortunately with work and everything else I have only just found time to clean up the Warlord Soviets of the flash and mould lines and start painting the first model.

As stated before I was going to do roughly 2:1 winter:summer issue gymnastiorka where appropriate. This is still very much a test mini to allow me to play around with my palette. The main gym (tunic) colour is a mix of Citadel Graveyard Earth and Bleached Bone - and will be the same but with a tad more bleached bone for the extreme highlights. The shaded parts were originally Graveyard Earth mixed with Scorched Brown, but with my "arm length" test, the contrast wasn't quite enough, so I've gone with just Scorched Brown on this one. I'm not being to accurate with my mixes for the main colour as Soviet uniforms were notoriously haphazard off the production line, never mind the effects of weathering.



You may have noticed that I undercoat all of my minis in Scorched Brown, I find that generally it is close enough to black to be a substitute, it tends to be close to the base colour anyway, if you missed hard-to-reach areas it looks better than if you miss black, and overall I find it gives a slightly organic, gruby quality that I like.
The helmet I'm still not quite happy with, but I played about with Dark Angels Green for the base and then Dark Angels Green + Bleached Bone for the next layer, and highlighted the rim with Snot Green - the shade was just wrong unfortunately. I then put a Brown Ink wash over it followed by a Graveyard Earth + Dark Angels Green wash which I hastily chucked on and dabbed off - it gave it a more accurate dullish tone. When I'm not too lazy to get more paints out I may try adding a Codex Grey to the mix over Graveyard Earth. The sharovari (breeches) are just (my favourite) Graveyard Earth at the moment as I've called it a night, but they will be getting some shading and highlights (overall they'll be darker than the gym). Boots will be a nice grubby black/charcoal grey and will be getting spatterings of mud, as will the helmet etc.I have a free afternoon tomorrow so hopefully I can be a bit more productive.

Although we're not tying ourselves down too much, I'm looking to the Vistula campaign for the look of my chaps here and the Volksgrenadiers too probably. There were talks of some Russo-Japanese stuff, land and naval earlier which is really, really tempting, but I'm refusing to get anything till the current WWII is finished.... but watch this space ;)

I did attempt to write another pun / jokey title for this post but couldn't think of anything that met even my pitifully low standards of humour.

Comments

  1. I like him so far, don't worry too much about the speed of your progress, the Soviets never met a five year plan.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks very much for the comment, going to try and get a few more done tomorrow

      Delete
  2. The little guy is coming along great. I'm a Grognard from way back. I haven't wargamed since the days of Squad Leader but my editors at Osprey are always threatening to rope me into a wargame!
    I'd love to hear your experiences wargaming the American Civil War, since that's my main military interest. Also the Russo-Japanese War. I don't know much about it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks very much Sean, made a bit more progress since then but not posting till I have a squad finished - need all the motivation I can get!

      I'm working on a Trans-Mississippi campaign at the moment combining land and river elements so hopefully I should have something concrete to post up soon. Your Osprey book on ACW guerilla tactics is on my wishlist at the moment incidentally - you should give in to their threats and give it a go again

      Delete
    2. If you'd like to do a guest post over at Civil War Horror about wargaming the Trans-Miss, I'd love to have you.

      Delete
    3. I'd love too, thanks very much.

      Delete
  3. Drop me a line when you have something!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I certainly will, thanks again! In the long term we're covering the Bayou Teche, Red River, New Mexico and the Indian Territory so plenty of material to draw from hopefully

      Delete
  4. Keep up the great work!

    Looking forward to seeing a great deal more WW2 work from you guys ;)

    Happy Gaming,

    Allan

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks very much, really appreciate, shall hopefully be posting up some more soon...

      Delete

Post a Comment