Old Man Morin recently hit me up to help him out on a Big Project he is working on. I was brought on to paint an entire Soviet army for the man from the land before time since it takes him a month to paint one figure. The vast majority of the figures in this army are from West Wind Productions Berlin or Bust range. The force is very thematic an consists almost entirely of light infantry with small arms. Another requirement was that the arms would be painted in camouflage, instead of just being in khaki uniforms.
The command section is made up of an officer and two staff. There were some interesting command figures in the Berlin or Bust pack. Some I really liked, others were okay at best. I really like the NCO in the fur cap behind the officer.
The main support weapons in this army are three anti-tank rifles. The ATRs are from Black Tree. I replaced the BTD ATRs, which are made of white metal, with plastic ATRs from left over Warlord bits. Each ATR gunner is paired up with a scout with a rifle. One of the downsides of Berlin or Bust's scout packs is they don't have true scouts with rifles. Instead the Old Man sent me a giant pack of snipers. Since you don't need anymore than a few snipers I cut the scopes of the rifles to create scouts with rifles. You may also notice that I only painted the gunners' pants camouflage. This is because they have padded winter jackets. You will notice this on many of the BTD figures in the army.
Here we have a Soviet observer team. I like the look of these figures. They are very serious and have binoculars and maps.
Brad and I settled on two sniper teams. Half of these figures are Back Tree the others are Berlin or Bust. I prefer the BTD figures over the Berlin or Bust figures. On the whole Berlin of Bust figures look like apes in the face and have weird mold lines, lots of flash, and lack detail you find in other figures. This is especially true of the guns the figures are carrying. These rifles are very generic. I cant tell if they are Mosin Nagants or nerf guns.
The figures in these packs included two flame throwers. Both of the flame thrower figures are average and I would much rather pick up a flame thrower from another manufacture. Brad will be able to use these figures to make flame teams or to include them in Engineer teams. I have included them in engineer sections for these pictures.
The core of this force will be scouts with SMGs. Here we have four sections of six or seven figures. Against some of these poses are every nice, others are crud. There is a good mix of poses, but there are limits on the diversity in the packs. If you have a large squad it will be hard not to have repeat poses.
Here are the other two sections of scouts with rifles. Again these are all sniper figures with the scopes trimmed off.
The one thing that is really nice about Berlin or Bust range is cost, as it is one of the cheaper ranges out there. I also do like that the you can get scouts with rifles (even though you have to trim the scope). If you wanted to paint these scouts as assault engineers without armor, or snow troops, you easily could.
I really enjoyed working on this project for Grandpa Bolt Action (Official new name. - J) and it was hard to part with the army once it was done, but I now look forward to buying a bag or two of scouts from Berlin of Bust and painting them up for my self.
