Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Some Britannia 20mm Soviets

A few years ago I bought a platoon’s worth of Britannia Miniatures Red Army infantry in summer dress.  With all due respect to the late Dave Howitt, I confess I didn’t like then too much.  The sculpts seemed a little rough and clumsy, and they all had shaggy heads of hair, whereas I suspect that the average frontovik kept his hair close-cropped.    I tried painting up some and didn’t much like the results, but the spirit of guiding spirit of May here at the Painting Chapel has been to clear the old projects out of the way.

You may notice that the colour of the uniform is a bit off, and perhaps too yellow for everyone’s tastes.  I was not happy with the thinness of my Vallejo Russian Uniform and tried adding some other colours to it to thicken it up a bit, perhaps not very successfully.   Anyway, this gives me a start on a 20mm platoon for Too Fat Lardies’ Chain of Command and/or BG Kursk, though I need to find the rest of the bag of unpainted figures and paint them so I have complete sections of riflemen and SMGs.   

The NKVD officer reading from Stalin’s latest patriotic proclamation (Fight Gloriously Or Be Shot) will make for some tabletop colour, and of course there is the customary junior officer waving his pistol in the air.

What do you think of Britannia figures?  It’s good to see that the moulds have survived and the figures are still being sold by the Grubby Tanks people, and I must admit I do like the Britannia 20mm WW2 resin vehicles, of which I have a few.

Blessings to your brushes!

MP

These figures bring my 2014 totals to:

28mm Mounted: 13

28mm Foot:  22

28mm Artillery: 1

20mm Foot:  9

20mm Buildings/Terrain Pieces: 1

15mm Foot:  26

15mm Buildings/Terrain Pieces: 3

6mm Buildings/Terrain Pieces: 2

Kilometres Run:   596

8 comments:

  1. Actually, I don't reckon those figures look too bad at all: animated and expressive, and full of character. I admit, though, I, too, find that style of figure hard to paint well. You have probably seen before my thoughts on uniform colour - anywhere in the right ballpark, the surrounding parking lots and approach roads is 'right'. There are always variation in dye matches, the rate of fading and weathering and what have you, even with modern technologies. I'm willing to bet that the sort of shades you have shown here would have been easy enough found worn during the War. If it is a bit much, though, it might be toned down by a thin brown wash (rather than 'dip and flick', paint the wash on).

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  2. Based,painted and in action i think the figures look pretty good,well worth running with I say.

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  3. I agree with the above, the colour looks fine, especially if you mix a darker shade for the next batch. I am pretty sure the Soviets had the same situation as the Germans:
    http://atthefront.com/german/uniforms/images/aboutgermanuniforms/Fieldgrey.jpg

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  4. Thanks all. I remember being at an exercise and seeing about a thousand soldiers milling about at the EndEX party (known as a "smoker" in CAF parlance) and noticing that there were literally dozens of different shades of the same uniform, simply because of age and fading, even though I suspect that modern industrial production means that dye lots are a lot more standardized than they would have been in Soviet Russia. Ion's advice is good, if these fellows weren't already treated with dullcote I would give them a wash. I'll follow Thomas' advice and make the next lot darker.

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  5. Agree about the Britannia range- not a fan of their figures at all (chunky, bowlegged, overly exaggerated - all personal opinion of course), but quite like and happily use their vehicles.

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