DDR Build Log Progress - Infantry and Recon!

Here is the latest on painting my East Germans - the good news is I'm making some progress, the bad news is it looks like I'm going to have to continue to borrow and proxy for the first few rounds of the Firestorm Campaign. If you haven't gotten in on the latest online Firestorm campaign, it really is worth your time. I'm one of the helpers for Warsaw Pact, and so far the discussion is good and people are getting a lot of games in.

Over the past week or so I've spent a lot of time going through the infantry. In my last entry, I'd indicated that one of the figure styles was missing from my Mot-Schützen Kompanie (TEBX02). True to form, Battlefront quickly responded with the replacement figures, and a few more for good measure. Overall clean up on the infantry wasn't bad, it just took a while.

I also went ahead and cleaned up the East German Mot-Schützen Heavy Weapons platoon (TEG706) as I'm going to need the SA-14 Gremlin team and the AGS-17 grenade team for my main force. I went ahead and built up the AT-4 Spigot teams as well, though the first incarnation of my force won't need them. The Spigot teams were a little more challenging to assemble, and the grenade launchers will likely provide some challenges as well in final assembly.

Once I had all of the teams assembled on the ubiquitous "craft sticks," I went ahead and primed them with a white primer - I just used a standard can based white primer and it worked well. I try not to use thick primers as they can obscure detail.

I then moved on to base coating the infantry. I'm still using Vallejo paints, so I used the Battlefront color conversion. They recommend English Uniform as the replacement for Battlefield Brown which is recommended in the Volksarmee book as the base coat. To my eye it looks a lot darker than what was actually used on the figures, at least in the large detail pictures. If you look at the distance shots near the end of the modeling guide, the uniforms look much darker.

I'm not going to bother trying to do the camouflage as the detail is simply much too small to bother with at 1/100 scale (see actual uniform below).  I may end up going with a slightly lighter shade then what is recommended for the final uniform based on the Vallejo to Colours of War conversion chart, but I'm going to play with some images and see what "net color" I visually get when I shrink an image of the "real thing" to the right size. I have a hunch the uniform guide in the book may not be too far off as long as I add a good highlight as the final step.

I've also been working to finish up the vehicles, which are going to take a bit to paint, but should come out nicely. I finished up my recon section which consists of the BRDM-2 Recon Platoon (TSBX10). The resin pieces are some of the nicest I've seen from Battlefront, but the guns take a little clean up.

So again - slow progress - but steady progress. I'm going to be "at it again" tonight to see if I can mostly finish up the building. I've been playing with the T-55AM both from Battlefront and PSC, and it is an interesting comparison which I'll talk about more in a future blog.