15mm WW2: Russian Armor

This week I was able to finish off my complete Russian army in 15mm for Operation Bagration. Last week I managed to get the rifle platoon and support weapons completed, and this week was for all the armor I needed. Totally I have ten vehicles for the army. Here they are all together.

The single color scheme made them a breeze to paint. The longest delay I had was assembling the Plastic Soldier Company's T34 models, which took a few sessions to do.  The Battlefront models were easy and fairly idiot-proof, which is so necessary for me.

I painted them all with PSC's spray paints, this color being the aptly named "Russian Armor" color. The PSC models took the paint wonderfully and only needed a thin coating to look good. The Battlefront models look just as fine, but needed a bit more paint to cover.

Starting at the front and working back, here's what you're looking at.

This is a Battlefront IS-2. I only need one for my purposes. There is supposed to be an MG mounted on it, but I couldn't figure out where and expected the flimsy thing would just break off anyway. So I left it off.

Here is the bulk of the armor, T34/76 & 85 from Plastic Soldier Company. These tanks were a bitch to assemble (for me, real modellers don't struggle with them) and I screwed up all of them in one way or another. Oh well. These were a Christmas gift last year from my son, and I'm glad to have finally assembled them.

In the picture above the front two are 85s and the rear three are 76s. I built turrets for both, so I can interchange them as needed. That's a cool feature of these PSC kits.

Here are two SU-76M self-propelled guns from Battlefront. These fit together nicely, thought it took me a minute to understand what the bent bits were. They turned out to be the railing pieces at the back of the vehicle.

Bringing up the rear are two SU-85 tank destroyers. These were by far the easiest to assemble, with only the gas tanks needing any sort of care which is mostly just not gluing them to your fingers.

After I assembled and spray painted them, I gave them a brown wash and some minor weathering. Finally I added the PSC decals I bought for this project. I like their decal sheets, but they hardly provide enough stars for what they charge.

As an afterthought, I do have one last unit to add to this force. I need a 45mm AT gun team. I've ordered a blister and will put together two of them to honestly and truly finish these Russians. Now all I have to do is play the campaign!