AHPC 'East' Bonus Round: 6mm and 3mm vehicles

Hi folks,

This week has been one of mainly prep, bad moods and full schedules...

I've now finished a good portion of the initial 'Gunuary' workload I had set myself. As such, I've moved from painting the guns to painting all the various bits and bobs that are required to put a full artillery unit on the table in Flames of War. As such, on the painting table currently are:

3 x Jeeps
3 x UC OP Carriers
8 x 15cwt Trucks
8 x Matadors
5 x Command squads (15 figures)
2 x OP stands (4 figures)
2 x Staff teams (8 figures)
Infantry for the bases of each of the 15cwt trucks... (25ish figures)
1 x resin scenic base

I'm the first to warn against overloading your table at any one time with stuff to paint. For me it puts a real dampener on my feelings towards the project, as the sheer amount to do seems to loom far too large. Along with a very busy time at work and the changes eventually (although for late war not initially) happening in v4 of the FoW rules mean that a lot of these 'extras' might be useless. I was starting to feel like putting the painting aside for a bit.

However, the v4 changes wouldn't impact for a long time, and I have the models bought. And stopping altogether wouldn't get anything done! So I resorted to just ignoring the bulk of it, picking 4 stands of the infantry figures and just getting them done to a wash stage. Last night I started on the next 4 stands, and I will just keep chipping away. I also spray coated the various vehicles and generally just made slow steady progress.

Last week I finished off my 5.5" guns, and quickly worked on some 6mm and 3mm stuff to enter into the AHPC bonus round, which this time had the theme 'East'. I had thought about doing some Full Thrust ESU star ships, but decided to stick with the Gunuary theme and go for my 6mm Soviet artillery (conventional and anti-air).

These 6mm models are all GHQ and are the first 6mm figures I think I have ever painted aside from some Epic models back in the day.

5 x 'Shilka' ZSU-23-4's.

5 x BMP2

5 x SA-13 'Gopher' SAMs

5 x 2S1 'Carnation' SP Guns

These are all part of my 6mm Team Yankee project - although the fact they are in packs of 5 means they don't currently exactly fit the TY army entries.

Radio aerials were done using a small pin vice and some toothbrush bristles. I have considered putting some 1/300th decals on them as well, but haven't ordered any yet. The pictures came out very dark, so I had to mess with the contrast and brightness, which has meant they look a little flat colour wise.

These are mounted on standard 'small' flames of war bases. For the bases I used PVA and sand, then strips of 1mm static grass and my standard length static grass (3 or 4mm?). I also added some small tufts.

I also, while I was working on these, dug out some of the 3mm stuff I still had to finish. This consisted of 4 x Cobras and 2 x Hinds (with the other 2 Hinds just needing basing). These are also based on 'small' flames of war sized bases and using some small paperclips for the flight stand. You should be able to see on the bases where the paperclip has been bent to provide a base. These are all 'Tumbling Dice' 1/600th scale models.

Hinds:

Cobras:

Side views:

So that's all I've finished since last week... hopefully soon I'll have a lot more to show off!