6th Guards Tank Brigade - Part 5 - Finished

G'day folks. Griddon here again with the final installation* of the 6th Guards Tank Brigade mini project. They are finished along with the HMG platoon to turn my Hell's Highway force into a Fortress Europe Confident Trained Infantry list which I'm going to play as 6th Guards Tank Brigade supporting the 15th Scot's.

Not a lot of words for you. Just pictures. Quite a few of them. Tips, advice, comments. All welcome.

6th Guards Tank Brigade - Part 4

Hi All. I thought it would be a good idea to update on my 6th Guards Tank Brigade project.

I've finished the tanks! Hoorah! All six are completely finished including decals, weathering and sealer. I've resisted posting a picture of the whole lot as I want to hold that over until I'm finally finished with the entire 1750 point list. So, for the moment, just a picture of the first one!

I also thought I'd show how I'm doing my machine gun platoon. I have two methods on the go. For the first method I have miniatures glued to the end of a small nail for ease of access. These are the guys from the universal carriers and they might have been quite awkward to paint if glued to the vehicle. I wanted to show this method as it's how I painted the first two of my three British late war rifle platoons. It has its merits for standard 15mm infantry for sure. Ease of access being the main one. This allows you the best chance at catching all the details of the miniatures but once finished you have to glue them to the base and texture / paint the base seperately.

I now prefer to glue my bare metal miniatures to the base, texture the base and undercoat prior to painting. I find this much quicker and with four infantry per base it is usually pretty easy to get in amongst the minis to capture the detail. In the instance of the Vickers machine gun platoon, I'm not sure I had much choice anyway as the Vickers machine gun itself is rather difficult to assemble as it has a very small land area to make the bond for both the Vickers and the belt feed. Super Glue makes short work at messing up paint jobs so it just wasn't worth the risk for me.

6th Guards Tank Brigade - Part 3

Yo. Back again with a quick update. With my exams now over I'm free to concentrate on more fun things. Having prepared my Churchills before the exam I was good to go with some painting this weekend. I managed to get from bare resin / metal to fully painted over the course of a couple of days. Probably about 4 hours total work. They aren't finished yet. They need about 30 minutes of work each with the decals but I'll get round to that this week.

So, for the painting I went with the basecoat, wash and drybrush method for the main armor and did some detail work only on the various bits of gear strapped to the tank.

Here is a quick run down of the process for those who aren't familiar. Let's assume you've got your preferred primer already on the model.

Step 1: Basecoat by brush, two thin coats of Russian Uniform.

I didn't worry too much about getting Russian Uniform where it wasn't wanted at this point as the tracks get a coat of very dark brown later.

Soviet Guards Tank Battalion

Right-o, Blackwolf back again, with a quick update on my current project.

A little while ago while browsing through my LGS I decided to start a Soviet Tank Battalion. I have no idea how the thought popped into my head, it really was a spur of the moment decision. There I was looking at all the shinny boxes (especially the German ones... I'm a sucker for the Germans) when I just decided that yes, grabbing a box of T-34/85's and starting a tank horde was an excellent idea.

Cut to present day, and I have 21 T-34/85's finished, plus 3 captured Panthers (I only need 2, but painted the 3rd for the fun of it). My initial list was something like this...

HQ T-34/85 with cupola

10 T-34/85's with cupola's

10 T-34/85's with cupola's

2 Decoy Panthers

Rota Razvedki Platoon with 3 squads (SMG's) in Universal Carriers.