Vehicle painting tips

Great little article posted this week by Leif Eriksson with some great tips on the differences between painting a figure and a vehicle.   Blindingly obvious really, but I've never seen it written so clearly and concisely, or thought about it in this way before.

Its particularly useful for painting block coloured vehicles vice camo, so this will be most useful for my upcoming North Africa project - a theme he uses in his examples.

Great Job Leif- thanks for sharing!

http://figurfanatikern.blogspot.com/2015/06/how-to-paint-vehicles-viking-way.html?showComment=1435181977060#c7168326238959622765

Book Review: My Immortal - The Vampires of Berlin

I'd been looking about for this book for ages (since 2011 - see here) but without success.  Then recently it popped up for free - or maybe I just found it - on my Kindle Unlimited account; got to be happy with that!

The book starts out in modern Berlin, with an American scholar/author about to announce some shattering revelations about the final days of the Third Reich.  He is murdered quite quickly once he begins his announcement and in the course of the investigation the story flashes back to the final days of the Battle of Berlin.  Rag tag bands of survivors, German veterans, Volksturm and angry Russians  struggle in the ruins of the Reich capital.  Then the Vampires made an appearance - shadowy at first and then building to a conclusion with some nice occult bits. 

Unfortunately, my impressions of the book were not good.  It reads very much like self published fan fiction.  Readable (at times barely) and without the style a professional author brings.   That said, I persevered and about half way through the book the pace and quality picked up significantly.  

Overall I give it 2 stars - mostly because its a Weird WW2 fix and there aren't too many of those about.


PS The author is clearly a fan of Game of Thrones - so don't get too attached to any of the characters! 

200th Anniversary of a "Close Run Thing"

Today being the 200th Anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, I thought I'd dig out some pics of my visit to the Battlefield back in 2002 (when I had more hair!).


And I celebrated with the Lad by watching a good documentary on the Battle.

And here is a really crappy video I made at the time!

Soviet IS4 Heavy Tank Protoype

Fantastic pics I found on the interweb of the post WW2 Soviet IS4 tank.  Not familiar with it?  Here is what wiki has to say about this real tank.

IS-4

There are 2 different tanks known as IS-4. One of these (Objekt 245) was an IS-2 rearmed with a long 100mm D-10T cannon. The other IS-4 was a new vehicle projected by LKZ in parallel with the IS-3 (Objekt 703) by the same design and development bureau. For this second IS-4 the IS-2 hull was lengthened, with an extra set of road wheels added and an improved engine. Both hull and turret armour were increased. Several alternative armaments were explored in paper studies but ultimately the IS-2's original 122mm gun was retained. An effort was also made to make use of technical data derived from study of the German wartime Panzer V Panther tank, which influenced the layout of the second IS-4's engine cooling system. The tank was approved for mass production from 1947 to 1949 but due to disappointing speed and mobility only 250 were built. Most of these were transferred to the Russian Far East. In 1949, production was cancelled and later these tanks were removed from service.

Today I finished pointing this Object 701 No. 6 (IS-4 Prototype). It’s a theoretical subject panted as it might have looked during the battle for Mainland Japan sometimes in late 1945 or early 46. I gave this model a faded chipped camo seen on some of the cold war Soviet armor. Some reference photos are included below. 

Again I would like to thank Ivan Cocker for the awesome figures. I would also to think Chris Jerrett for his help with scanning and providing me with the reference photos.

The kit used is the Trumpeter IS-4 kit that I reworked and backdated to an Object 701 No. 6 using Evergreen sheet plastic, Aber PE and copper sheet. As most of you know there is a gallery containing step-by-step photos of the full build can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1468022133437327.1073741858.1428235010749373&type=3 

Thanks for looking
ANPW