I’m doing it all in the shed, not the Hobby Room. First thing to do is put down some cardboard to stop any drips/mess going onto the table underneath:  and then some newspaper on top of it:  . Here are the hills as plain foam shapes: – one has a flat summit, the other a natural/curved summit. I wanted a flat summit for one so I could put at least one of my based trees on it (to further block LOS, but also because hills often do have trees growing on them!).

Open and stir the paint, making sure you’ve got some water to rinse out the brush with:  . Begin painting with your base/earth colour:  – I’m using Haymes’ ‘Kayak Brown’ as my earth colour. Cover until you only have the bit left where you are holding it: – as my polystyrene foam was rescued from a rubbish skip, I’m turning them over and putting a light coat on the bottom to cover some of the dirt they got on them when shoved into the skip: . When you’ve done all the hills you have, then stop and let them dry: . I’ll do the remaining white when they are dry (probably early tomorrow morning, we’ve been having hot days and warm nights lately).

Begin to think about what flock, talus, underbrush etc. you are going to glue on when all this painting is finished. I like to do two coats on the exposed surface of the hill, so these won’t be ready for any glue tomorrow or the day after…

Here’s the obligatory photo: .

The spares box is in the top left-hand corner. I use an A4 photocopy paper box and put sprues in there. If I’ve butchered some sprues or I’m working on whole companies of vehicles, I’ll use plastic ziplock sandwich bags (middle of photo and bottom left) to store the sprues or bits of sprues. That way if I need some individual track links because I’ve used up all those on the supplied sprue, I go right to the appropriately marked sandwich bag (eg. Revell Panzer III) and there’s the right size parts for the right manufacturer.

The bits n’ pieces boxes (right side of photo) are fishing tackle boxes. In them I store pieces snipped off sprues like vehicle/pioneering tools, leftover machineguns, jerry cans, headlights…any useful single-piece parts. The long blue tackle box mostly holds vehicle stowage in the form of rolled up tarpaulins – I buy these stowage pieces at swap n’ sells where I can get them made in resin. Now, it is possible to make your own vehicle stowage…Paul from Plastic Warriors makes rolled/folded up tarpaulins out of spraypainted tinfoil. I tried what he did – it works reasonably well and is easy to do. But 4-6 rolled tarps in resin for $5? That’s pretty reasonable too.

So, that’s how I retain useful things whilst building and detailing my model kits.

Here they are with a base coat of Kommando Khaki and primary camouflage pattern of Catachan Green:

Here they are with the secondary camouflage scheme of black (done here with Chaos Black): .

I reckon that’s a pretty fair go at recreating the camouflage on the “BA-6 from the Separate Recon Battalion /1st Tank Division/1st Mechcorps, The North-western Front, Krasnogvardeysk (Gatchina) region, August 1941″ .

Longterm readers of my blog would know of my attempts to find information about the terrain of the Pipyet Marshes. Amongst the things I found is this translation of a report made by an SS Sturmbannfuehrer which makes reference to them.

It is thanks to groups like Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority  that documents like these are available. May we all learn, remember and prevent events like this from happening again.

I employed Google’s image search and tried a number of different search terms in a number of different combinations. I used English words, which I knew would severely restrict the numbers of results I found even before . I did find two photos – one here and one here – but they are both from a museum of Ukrainian folk architecture. Nothing else that I was satisfied with. I had tried a number of different country names – Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany – so I felt I’d been fair.

Once I changed the location search term to to “Britain”, up popped many photos, so stone fences seem to be fairly commonplace in England, Scotland and Ireland but not so much in Eastern Europe.
I won’t buy these stone fences now – I’d rather buy and paint up another set of wooden fences (which you see in some of my AAR/game report photos).

Still, it was worth doing the research.

I decided that I didn’t want to undercoat the rubber during undercoating of a completed vehicle  in case the rubber was affected in some way (I’ve had bad experiences with this with rubber terrain). I decided to undercoat everything, assembled and unassembled, before fixing the tyres onto the hubs. So, everything got undercoated.

The remaining assembly took comparatively little time. Here’s how they look, undercoated, assembled and awaiting a proper paint job – first the

BA-6M (БА–6M) and BA-9 (БА-9) together: .

Here’s the BA-6M (БА–6M) by itself: . This armoured car (Бронеавтомобиль, in Russian) is the more useful of the two to me, so during assembly I checked each sprue of both kits carefully and, if some parts on one sprue were more poorly formed or in worse condition than others, I made sure this kit got the best parts.

Now for the BA-9 (БА-9) by itself: . From a distance, this vehicle looks OK. A closer inspection shows the hull-mounted smaller machinegun is ‘bent’ in the middle. This was because the remaining light machinegun available on all the sprues (as one was missing) useable for this kit was broken in two, and this was the best I could do to repair it. Closer inspection also shows that the only accurate towing hook is attached to the rear right…the other three towing hooks I took from surplus Roden Opel Blitz sprues, so this BA-9 is being kept in operation by salvaged parts.

The next stage is a proper paintjob.

The lazy option is just to do overall Russian Green. Since so much of Russian stuff is already Russian Green (and a fair proportion of the unassembled stuff will end up Russian Green too) I decided to do some internet research to see about more interesting paint schemes/camouflage schemes.

Via the RKKA in World War II website, I found some useful stuff, most importantly a whole page on the BA-6 & BA-6M, featuring some recreations of actual camouflage schemes. Fantastic! The “BA-6 from the Separate Recon Battalion /1st Tank Division/1st Mechcorps, The North-western Front, Krasnogvardeysk (Gatchina) region, August 1941″ looks like one to try! Oh, and back at the top of the BA-6 page, you can see a BA-6 camouflaged with twigs and branches on the move…

It’s an interesting camouflage (камуфляж) scheme, that one for the 1st Mechanised Corps – it’ll be a good challenge to reproduce. The Russians did camouflage some of their stuff, so always having boring Russian Green paintjobs/camouflage can sometimes be bypassed by us wargamers…just do a little research first.

My Dragon Models 1/72 scale Sd.Kfz 251/1 D’s are potentially one step away from being finished: .

When I started them, I thought that I might glue lichen on their sides to represent added foliage, as many German forces did to their vehicles in the last 2-3 years of the war. You can see a historical example of this ‘foliage as additional camouflage’ practice here. I’ve already done this to some of my vehicles, like my 234/3′s and my Hetzers.

Now I’m not sure I want to do this. The 234/3′s and the Hetzers aren’t meant to get so much game use compared to the 251/1′s. If they aren’t getting so much game use, I figure they can be a little more delicate and elaborate! Lichen on them is fine!

But I’m now not sure about adding lichen to these 251/1 D’s. These 251/1′s don’t have good vantage/attachment points to secure the lichen, so it’s possible that I could botch what I do. I don’t want to botch what has gone pretty well! The other 251′s I’ve done or are yet to do aren’t going to have lichen attached…plus it’s only an average of $10-15 per kit at swap-n-sells to get more if these ones do end up looking tatty after a couple of years. To topit all off, I’ve only been averaging 4 games a year lately…

Still, I’m thinking that they are fine as they are and that I don’t have to be so realistic all the time. Maybe I’m lazy and just want them off my table? Dunno.

So, readers, I’m turning this over to you. Do I follow through and add the lichen to them, or stop now?

I was pleasantly surprised, when I opened it, to find two kits inside: .

Both are two-thirds assembled. I’m hoping each bag has been labelled correctly! There are no instructions for either, but I can get them from Henk of Holland’s wonderful repository.

I decided to start with the bag labelled BA-9: . I’m unfamiliar with Soviet armoured cars (or Бронеавтомобиль in Russian) – it looks like it has a light-calibre main gun, maybe even a machinegun or automatic cannon instead of a normal cannon: . Some reading courtesy of the English version of The Russian Battlefield website confirms that it is a machinegun, a 12.7-mm DK machine-gun, and that this vehicle is a BA-9 (БА-9 in Russian) . For Panzerfaust: Armoured Fist purposes, a 12.-7mm MG is a HMG.

Now for the BA-6m (БА–6M). It’s in a similar state to the BA-9:  . Looking at it’s main armament, it does seem to have a 45mm cannon, like most later BA armoured cars do: . Both the BA-6M and the BA-10 had the same armament, so this vehicle also seems to be correctly labelled.

So all up, a good deal! A cheap, useful purchase actually yielded two useful, even cheaper, purchases! As Paul from “Plastic Warriors” says, “model on!”

As both have been partially assembled, I have decided to finish assembly of both before undercoating them. I’ve been doing some research about Russian armoured cars so I’ll be sharing more about them with you over the weeks and months it takes me to finish.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 44,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 16 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

These are the links, in date descending order (librarian tech speak) that I feel are worth nominating as candidates for best link for 2011:

“10 minutes spent on terrain each day keeps the guilt doctor away” – after Paul, from his ‘Plastic Warriors’ blog – November 21

The 7.92 mm Pz B39 – what is it? – July 4

What does it look like inside a company that makes plastic model kits? – May 20

It’s a tree-basing bonanza… – May 6

Camouflage – how good is yours? – April 21

If you are good enough, you could make your own toy soldiers… – April 4

and lastly:

How we modellers can help Japan – March 15

Paul from “Plastic Warriors” has two great posts in here, and Bunkermeister’s one about helping Japan in the wake of the Fukushima disaster is very good too. To be able to find a good review about historical weapons was very helpful and something I didn’t think I’d find so readily. The camouflage on the Maus from the “Modelling Madness” is lots of fun, and seeing inside Italeri was unprecedented.

All the links above are well worth a visit. If you haven’t seen these while reading my blog throughout the year (or if you are a recent newcomer to my blog), hop to it. You’ll enjoy them.

The winner, though, are the photos from inside Italeri that a member of the Modellismo Piu model-making forum shared.

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I didn’t get any model kits for Christmas, if you’re wondering.