Painting the Hordes

Continued from The Next Step.

While there's not much assembly involved in Soviet Infantry, there is a good deal of preparation involved. I started by buying the Strelkovy Company box and an extra Strelkovy Platoon blister. This gave me most of what I needed to make a full strength Tank Rider Company, plus several extra troopers since a Tank Rider platoon is smaller than a Strelkovy platoon. This is useful since there always seems to be a few damaged or miscast models in a package.

Unfortunately, there are a few other differences between a Tank Rider company and a Strelkovy company, mainly in the options they can take. I wanted to take both a machine gun platoon and an anti-tank rifle squad. Strelkovy companies don't have anti-tank rifles as an option, and only take a single machine gun squad instead of the two present in a platoon. Since neither machine gun nor anti-tank gun squads appear in Battlefront's special order catalog, that meant I was going to have to buy a whole company blister of each in order to fill out my Tank Riders.

I decided to put off that purchase while I got started on my infantry. As I cleaned each model of any extra flash, and straightened any bent weapons, I then sorted them into rows of identical models. This was so I could paint a group of identical models together, which was to prove helpful in speeding the painting process. I also took the worst of the damaged and miscast models and set them aside.

Next I took all the individual models and glued each one to a plastic cap from bottled water using a dab of Elmers' white glue. This gives me something to hold while painting the model. After the model is painted, then I can just pop it off the cap, clean up the bottom if necessary, and stick it on a base.

After that I painted them pretty much the same as I did my tankodesantniki, the only differences being that I tried to pay a little more attention to detail on the face and where different base colors met so that there was a bit of black left as a border. I didn't worry too much about this, just enough so that the wash effect was enhanced a bit.
After this, all that was left was the basing, but I'll go into that next time, along with what I plan to add to this force to bring it to 2000, 2500 and even 3000 points. I'll also go into the changes that I had to make in order to become compliant with the 2nd edition rules of Flames of War.

Continued in Basing the Hordes