Dust Warfare: KV-3 Heavy Walker

Here is the Soviet heavy walker KV-3.  Along with the Wotan it is one of my favorite units in the game, both visually and in use.  It's a hard hitting and survivable unit, and it looks good doing it.  As usual with the Dust kits they come pre-built.  However you will spend the time you would have been putting it together to fill, file, and clean all of the mould and seam lines.  Kinda a pain really.  A lot of it would be easier if you built it yourself. The primer that it comes pre-coated with usually works out well though.

Also, they don't include any decals other than some stenciled markings, which I paint over anyway... So, I got some Soviet markings and lettering/numbering from my favorite hobby shop Section 8.  Below you can see the version with the dual 152mm cannons because if one is good two will be better.

"Matrioshka"

I used AK washes and grimes for the weathering. Had to buy more of their white spirit since other thinners don't seem to cut it for the streak marks.

I kind of regret not putting a star on the front, as I had with the KV-47 Aero.

I did not add any extra stowage as I do with my German walkers.

Though this scheme is simpler than my German camo, it does involve color modulation.  So, it takes about as long as painting the camouflage.

Here is the other version, with dual heavy Gatling cannons.
"Babushka"

"For the Motherland!"
This picture also shows off the texture I added to the front portion of the hull.  I gave it a cast look with some Tamyia Mr. Surfacer. It's great stuff.

"Repaired April 1947"

Hope you enjoyed the view.  You may notice these pictures are a bit better quality than the earlier posts this year. This is because I finally got a daylight worklamp and added it to the photo setup.  This shows the colors much better with little to no retouching on Aviary. Before I had to tweak the contrast, saturation, and brightness to get a decent turnout. This had varying results. The new lamp is great, so expect much nicer photos going forward.

Just check out this reshot picture of the Panther from my last post and I think you can see the difference this light really makes. Brings out the truer colors and details much nicer.

PzAufklL. I-C "Hans" (Early Production)

I finally got around to finding my memory card today and so I charged up the camera and took some pictures of the walker I finished last week.  This is the early production Hans that comes in the Dust starter set which I split with one of my friends.  I primed this walker at the same time as I did the medium panzer walker and as such I did not have my new airbrush and did not attempt any color modulation.

Even still I don't think any of the colors turned out looking flat or too uninteresting.  For the chipping I mostly used a blister pack sponge piece to dab and a brush to add scratches and larger scuffs.  After that is a rather light highlight to look like the edge of chipped paint. I used a lot of AK Interactive weathering products for this model.  A couple of filters, the brown wash for DAK vehicles, and three of the streaking grimes. After the clear coat I add some MIG Productions pigments for a dusty finish.  Especially on the feet and lower legs.

Here's the front of the model.  The only thing I am unhappy with in these pictures is how the color of the grass shows up as really quite yellow.

More after the break.

Dust Warfare: Update

So, got two more games of Dust in last week.  One was 150pts against Andy's Axis.  We played an objective based game,  by the end I had a handful of troops left and held on of my objectives, the bridge.  My dice were not with me again and I could not do much harm, whereas Andy shot me all over the place.  We caught a lot of things we missed in our first game like blitzkrieg is only for move orders.  We used medics and engineers properly,  radios issuing orders out of control range and a few other minor things.  They sorta came out over the course of the game and we were both still sorta learning as we went.  Andy read up on the rules beforehand while I was working on the table.  The second game was also 150pts but we did a 1v1v1 game with Andy, Kevin, and I deploying on an edge each.  We played objectives again, but it saw that you can just kill everything and win in these smaller games.  Speaking of killing, it's something that my dice actually allowed this game. This game was really fun with units and walkers dying spectacularly left and right.  Turn 2 I believe it was, had my Ludwig maim Kevin's light walker then his other light blew up the Ludwig and my Battle Grenadiers reacted and blew up the light walker.  Meanwhile some of Kevin's Rangers grenaded Andy's Lothar to death.  This left my untouched Hans and Kevin's light walker with 1 hit left as the only two vehicles left.  In the end I had part of a command squad and some grenadiers holding the bridge and Andy had 2 partial squads left and finished me off.  I think he had 6-7 models left in the end and he won it.

All in all my original opinions of Dust remain.  Though the things we forgot are really important and really added to the game in a great way.  Reactions are great and really useful at times.  I can't wait to play again.

On the hobby side I got my three camo colors for my walkers.  There they are, flammable and everything.  I really like Tamyia for airbrushing, especially when using the Tamiya thinner.  You can really thin them down and they still cover extremely well.  I would say they are much better suited to the airbrush than regular painting where they sometimes pull off with additional brushstrokes.

Here we see the disassembled walkers have received their first coat, they look like they belong in a desert at this point, but I'm going for a camo scheme I really liked on some German tanks I've seen.

Next I added the brown to everything, I was really liking where it was going at this point and all was going well.

This continued as I finished with the dark green.  Here's a pic of the Ludwig.

And one of the Hans.

Still a lot of work to do on these two, but I had the time to use the airbrush and had to do so today.  They need all of the metal and details picked out, weathering and damage done, and finally some decals.  I may get those from the dust game website.  I have finished painting the Kommandotrupp as well as a squad of Laser Grenadiers, one of the Battle Grenadier squads is also base colored.  Just took a break from them to do the airbrushing.  Some pictures of them later on.

Thanks for stopping by.