Old Stuff Day

Apparently March the 2nd was "Old Stuff Day", where you dig into the blog archive and repost an old post. Originator was the Warhammer 39.999 blog and although I missed the date I decided to dig something old and moldy up.

Before I started this painting blog I used to keep a series of project posts at our club forum and I think translating one of those would be quite suitable.  This was originally posted in two parts in september 2009 and detailed my preparations for a convention game about the Winter War at Stockholms Spelkonvent in december 2009. I have taken the liberty of editing the posts slightly while translating them to english. So without further ado, here is a blast from the past.

A pair of Frontline Resin's T26 soviet light tanks.

Aaaaalright, I have done some work on the T-26's. Cute little things.

I painted the tanks GW Knarloc Green and then gave them a liberal slosh of GW green wash to create some shadows and definition. I then painted the exhausts, tracks, and the large air intake on the back with GW Chaos Black.

Mean, green fighting machines.

I wasn't sure if I should do them in winter camo or not; I have a feeling they should be, on the other hand a plain white models is kind of boring. I have seen pictures of uncamoflagued tanks from the Winter War too boot. But then I figured this would be a golden opportunity to learn something new, so I decided to try out a worn camoflague scheme where the base colour is visible on exposed areas.

Painting by the numbers. Get it?

After doing most of the first hull I suddenly realised that I needed a way to tell the tanks apart. Since the players wouldn't know the models as well as I would, I needed something more obvious than just a small detail. That meant turret numbers. As far as I know the russian tank markings varied from year to year, from front to front, from unit to unit, even from day to day within the same unit sometimes. Some units numbered their tanks sequentially, others used complex systems similar to the german system where different numbers denotes company, platoon and individual vehicles. Some units had geometrical symbols or just numbers for the platoon but not the vehicles. So I justed painted two random numbers with a white marker on the turrets.

Areas around hatches and on top of the turret are extra weathered.

I then continued painting the tank. I left a square around the turret number free, and sort of squibbled thin lines of white all over the tank,leaving the green showing around the edges where the white paint would have weared off. I revisited some areas of extra wear and tear with a fine brush and GW Orkhide Shade.

It looks like shit up close, but the effect is better at a distance.

After that I used some pigments from a Tamiya Weathering set. The tracks recieved a healthy dose of soot, rust and metal, while the exhaust got even more soot and rust. The edges had a slight rub of metal and some random rust too. Finally I put some soot around the muzzle and Bob was my uncle.

The large box in the back is the air intake for the engine, a weak point.

The pictures on screen are about twice the size of the real model, so although the paint job looks crude it looks better on the gaming table. I didn't manage to get the tracks perfectly straight but it isn't noticable much after they were based. 

I didn't waste much time painting the running gear since it would be covered in snow. 

I used a couple of old credit-cards as bases. The snow is model railroad snowpaste from Noch, which I also dabbed randomly on the tracks and running gear.

The tanks in action, supporting the soviet infantry attack.

The two T-26 were used by the soviet forces on Stockholms Spelkonvent with great success. The soviet players didn't drive them well ahead of the infantry like they did historically. Instead they very unsportingly were used as mobile Machine Gun bunkers, much to the dismay of the finnish players.