Soviet Camouflage?

Some time ago I was surfing through one of my favourite sites (Engines of the Red Army in WW2) looking for information when I came across this picture. Needless to say the idea of a Soviet tank force in three colour camo was very exciting - I already have a lend lease Matilda force, a SU-76 battalion, and a somewhat understrength T34 76 and 85 battalion (that needs alot of extra bits painted). This could be a very unique, rather small (for a Soviet army) and fairly fun project.

So, with a bit of help from Casey and Vod I came up with the bare bones of a fun list, that might actually perform well and I have targeted the Mid War GT (in May) as the debut weekend. The basics of the list are as follows:

Mixed Tankovy Battalion

6 KV-1e (one has the Company HQ)

19 T-26 (one of 10, one of 9)

3 BA-64

10 BA-10

4 76mm Zis-3 AT guns

Sporadic Air Support (the Tiger, Elephant, KV killer - or at least thats the plan!)

The theory is that the KV's can waddle through most enemy fire, the T-26s can assault most enemy infantry, the BA-10s (with their lack of Hen & Chicks) are the truly maneuverable element, the BA-64s are a cheap platoon, and the 76mm Zis guns give me an ambush, some cheap AT and another cheap platoon to get up to 6 deployments.

I'll go into the list in a bit more detail "soon", but in the meantime I am playing around with some colour theory. Thanks to this article on Soviet camo, I was able to get some suggested Federal Standard colours to use as a starting point - printing them off on a decent colour printer and then getting Blake and James's opinions on which Tamiya colours was the next move  :) This is my test swatch of the three colours (using the Tamiya range for the brown and buff, and the Russian Armour can for the green). I am pretty happy with how they worked out and now just need to find matching Vallejo colours to help me finish it off. The next test is going to be applying the paint to an actual tank! I am going to be using the same bluetac method from my French army to help me get the nice hard edges without having to brush paint the entire thing.

With a bit of luck I might have a finished sample or two over this weekend to see how it all works out.