BlackHawkHet: 28mm WWII Summer Soviets from Warlord

All,

For those of you that have been patiently awaiting the Red Horde, wait no more, they're here. The vast majority of these are from Warlord Games, but there's a few 3D printed models thrown in here, and there's a field gun and crew from West Wind, which is actually very nice (I'd never seen them before, had heard that they were smaller, but they fit right in to me). The vast majority of the infantry were bought in two decent sized lots off of Ebay, already painted. The first lot I bought didn't have any submachine guns (!!!???), so I got on the internet and bought me some submachine gunner, as well as some Maxim machine guns, ATRs, and engineers, all 3D printed, and a pair of 45mm guns from Plastic Soldier Company. Then the second lot of infantry came up on Ebay and I bought them; there were definite differences between how the two lots of infantry were painted, so I spent some time painting to try and make them look a bit more 'together,' and the second lot wasn't fully based. The bases were sanded and painted a dark brown, but that was it, whereas the first lot's bases were flocked and had clump foliage affixed to them, though quite a few of the bases had suffered substantially from use and shipping, so I set about working on them to make them a bit more uniform. Then I had to paint and base the 3D printed models and the guns/crew from PSC, so even though I bought a lot of stuff painted, I feel like I've got some sweat equity in this force as I had to spend quite a bit of time to get it looking like it currently does.

As almost always, the ones I fully painted were done with Contrast paints, and I did something a little different. This time I primed with khaki, then did the uniforms with Aggros Dunes, trying to get something decent for the Soviet uniform. Not perfect, but looks okay, I think.

The whole mess: seven HQ types, 41 riflemen, 10 automatic riflemen (SVT-40), 15 submachine gunners, seven light machine guns (with two dedicated assistant gunners), two sniper teams, two 50mm mortar teams, two 82mm mortar teams, two Maxim machine gun teams, three anti-tank rifle teams, two 45mm guns, and one 76.2mm gun.

The HQ types.

A couple bosses, with Makarovs.

A couple Lieutenants.

Another officer-type (right), not sure what the guy on the left is supposed to be, maybe a mailman? ;)

And looks like supposed to be a medic type? Haven't heard of them wearing blue pants, but I'm no expert on Commie stuff...

The submachine gunners. The eleven in the back are the 3D printed ones I painted up, the four at bottom right came in the second lot off Ebay (the first had ZERO submachine gunners for some reason).

Two from the second lot.

And the other two.

Now into the 3D printed guys. Not much on them in terms of equipment.

Next.

Very slightly different pose to the one above.

Crouching down.

And one more.

From the front, they've got good proportions, well rounded, well fed Commies.

The automatic riflemen.

First pair.

One of the guys did blue collars on a few of the guys, hadn't seen that before. Anyone know the significance?

Next pair. These were early Warlord plastics, meaning the weapons weren't molded into the hands/arms, so you had to figure out which arms worked best with which model, then fight the bastard to get them into place in something approaching a natural look. I didn't do these guys (thank Goodness), but I've had to do some others, and it's a pain in the @#$!!! So I'm very thankful to have bought these already assembled, and you just have to get over the fact that some of the weapons holds don't look perfectly natural (like the guy on the right). You don't even see it on the tabletop, just in these insane closeups.