Life in plastic, it's fantastic

Last week, I was feeling a bit blue, so I ended up making a bit of an impulse purchase of three plastic kits:  one from Renedra, one from Italeri/Warlord Games and one from Rubicon.

The Rubicon kit is a T-34/85.  The model came together very easily, and ended up looking quite nice.  I went for a basic green, hopefully approximating the right shade for a Russian tank.  I may have gone a little overboard with the red stars.

At least I didn't add any slogans...

Kit No. 2 is the Warlord Games Churchill Tank.  The kit shows its origins as an Italeri modelling kit rather than a wargaming kit as it's a bit more work to assemble, but not much more.  I chose the Churchill as I wanted to make one of the Calgary Tanks that saw action at Dieppe - and this is where I fell into the trap of research.  The 14th Canadian Army Tank Battalion (Calgary Regiment) took a combination of Churchill I, II and III.  The kit allows one to make any of around 7 variants, including the III (welded turret, armed with 6-pdr gun).  

My original plan was to paint the tank an olive drab/greenish colour.  But then, research.  Checking out a few sites, I realised that the Churchills at Dieppe were something called SCC-2 Brown, colloquially referred to as "dogsh!t brown" on one of the sites I found.  I hope my final colour is something close.

The kit included a great decal sheet:

It's a great selection of decals, including (hallelujah!) the blue-over-brown 175 for the Calgary Tanks, and the black ram on maple leaf of the Canadian 1st Armoured Brigade.  So far so good.  There are red-white-red recognition flashes, but only three, so I left off the one that should have been at the rear of the tank.  The sheet includes three pairs of tactical markings - yellow circles, red squares and blue triangles.  For the Calgary Tanks, the markings should be blue (junior regiment of the brigade) but triangles aren't accurate for Dieppe - I could use blue squares, blue circles or blue diamonds, but not blue triangles. So close, but not quite there!  I'd have to see if I could fake it with paint.

So I kept digging and decided that I'd recreate tank Bert of B Squadron.  I even found the serial number (T68560R).  And then I got to painting.

Here's an image of Bert after Dieppe:

And here is my version:

No serial number, left off the tank name.  Slacker.

Recognition flash in the wrong place (should be further forward, under the cable, but it was too hard for my meager decal-applying skillz).  Also, after I'd finished gluing the model together, I found out that the Dieppe tanks didn't have the guards over the tracks, but I wasn't about to attempt to cut them off.  (i.e., upper track should be exposed like in this photo:

And here's the rear.

No recognition flash.  Well, I like it, anyway.

but since I have no WWII miniatures, I'll need to put them away and avoid being drawn into collecting and painting miniatures for yet another era.

Anyway, here are the two tanks together:

Third kit was the Renedra Ramshackle Barn.  A nice kit, I'd wanted this one for quite a while, and finally picked one up.  It's a nice generic piece that can fit into many different places - for me, most likely to show up for an Old West game.

The kit also has some nice little bits, including a couple of ladders, pitchforks and a wagon wheel that will end up gracing other projects.

And finally, here are the three kits together:

Thanks for reading!