Pocket Panzers

  In my ongoing quest to flesh out my terrain collection, I tried out a method for making rivers that I saw from a guy named Matt Harvey on Facebook. I put my own spin on it, but the idea is essentially his and I am grateful for the inspiration! The key element here is a thin sheet of flexible transparent plastic. I don't think it would have to be transparent, but it helps. Harvey used stencil templates, I used lamination sheets. Cut the shapes you want from the sheets - 12 inch and 6 inch segments would be ideal, I think, but because of the 8.5x11 size of these sheets it made the most sense to do 10-inch lengths. I choose approximately 5 inches wide, as that seems to present a significant obstacle to 1/56 scale vehicles while also not taking up too much table space. I also cut some curves, which ended up fairly irregular. I don't really think 90-degree river bends look right, so I tried to avoid them. I used hot glue to build up the height of the riverbanks. I'm not sure y...

 Another batch of winter Soviets this week, much smaller. Got a NKVD commissar type, a PTRD anti-tank rifle team, and a Maxim MMG. Maxim is Warlord's metal kit, the others are Warlord plastic Soviets. Also mucking around with the photo setup and lighting. I wanted to add some variety to the brown greatcoats I've done my Soviets in, so I gave this officer type a fancy private purchase coat. I've hear these called 'tulep bekesha' but I don't really know what that means. Essentially they were an animal skin shearling coat. The fur color seems to vary a little, especially on the cuffs, but I just gave this guy white fur. I stippled some Tamiya modeling putty onto the plastic to give it the slightly wooly texture, which I think worked surprisingly well for a last-minute idea. This won't surprise any wargamers out there, but I have a couple projects halfway finished this week that I just need to buckle down and finish off. So it's possible you'll see some ...

  Haven't had a lot of hobby time this week, but I made an effort last weekend to start painting my pile of Soviets, managing 24 in about three days of fairly casual painting. These are all Warlord's 28mm plastics, which is a passable kit that shows its age a bit. To make matters worse, I got these secondhand and partially assembled off of eBay when I first got into the hobby, and so some of the building and priming is a little... rough. Either way, I think my painting has saved them, at least from tabletop distances. Their bases are MDF squares (leaders) and rounds (grunts), with a coat of brown craft paint, some snow from Citadel's Valhallan Blizzard, and a mix of Army Painter grass tufts. There are many more Soviets to paint, and hopefully I can keep the momentum up and at least get a full platoon for Chain of Command done up. First up, three SMG-armed squad leaders and a pistol-packing platoon leader. Spring has arrived here, and they look a bit out of place there in th...