Skip to main content

Cold War NVA, part 3: BMP-1

Two more vehicles from Butlers Printed Models arrived last week, one of which is this BMP-1 armoured personnel carrier. To me, the BMP-1 perfectly reflects the Soviet design aesthetic: ugly as sin, but it gets the job done! 

DDR NVA BMP-1

BMP is short for Boyevaya Mashina Pekhoty, which translates as (if Wikipedia is right) infantry fighting vehicle. Unlike many APC’s, which usually only carry a machine gun, the BMP actually packs quite a punch and can even take on tanks with its 73 mm gun and wire-guided anti-tank missile. It has a crew of 3 and can carry 8 infantrymen in the back.

DDR NVA BMP-1

Many countries have used the Soviet-built BMP-1, including East Germany. Unfortunately for me, East German BMP’s were never given any interesting camouflage paint jobs. Just solid green, I’m afraid. Looking at photographs of the period, it seems that two different shades of green were used. In some pictures the vehicles look to be a shade of olive drab similar to that used by NATO countries, while in others they seem to be painted a much brighter sort of green. See, for example, the image above. I settled on the brighter green, to differentiate it from my Cold War Dutch vehicles.

DDR NVA BMP-1

This is how the printed model arrived. A few minutes with a set of pliers later the vehicle was freed of its support material. I feel that this print is a bit rougher than the DAF YP-408 that I received earlier. The angled front hatch, for example, was full of deep grooves which needed to be filled and sanded smooth (Of course, I was too lazy to take pictures...). The road wheels also look pretty simplified and the tracks are entirely smooth with no attempt made at modelling individual track links. I hid these simplifications by gluing on some used coffee grounds to represent mud. These niggles aside, it is a pretty nice model and it paints up well, as you can see. 

Most East German BMP’s have very little in the way of markings apart from a little DDR emblem on the side of the turret. For some reason, the tricolour is always turned 90 degrees, so it looks more like a Belgian than a German flag. I tried to replicate the emblem, but painting the wreath, hammer and compass was a bit beyond my capabilities. Some BMP’s apparently also had the vehicle number painted on the sides in white, which I also did for some added visual interest.

DDR NVA BMP-1
DDR NVA BMP-1
DDR NVA BMP-1
DDR NVA BMP-1
DDR NVA BMP-1

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More simple Warhammer 40k terrain: craters and rubble piles

Time for some more simple 40k scenery: craters and rubble piles. Both are pretty easy projects and pretty quick too, if unlike me you plan out your work a little so you don’t need to continuously correct your mistakes along the way! For the craters, I started with two old writeable dvd’s. I first closed off the central holes with mdf miniature bases. I then broke off semi-triangular wedges of cork from a pan coaster and hotglued these to the dvds, forming circles (see the picture below). I then applied wall filler to the craters to hide the mdf circles covering the central holes and to add some texture to the cork. I then glued smaller bits of cork in between the larger wedges and added coffee grounds for texture. After this step I noticed that the cork wedges didn’t look very natural. Tapering them off made them look a lot better (picture below). I then gave everything a coat of black paint:  I still thought the craters didn’t look quite right, though. They were a bit too uniform ...
2 comments
Read more

Holy cel-shaded abs, Batman!

I thought I’d do something a little different for my first post of 2023. I picked up this Batman figure second hand about 15 years ago. Back then he wore an all black suit with the Tim Burton yellow logo and a yellow utility belt.   I had repainted him years ago, but never really liked the result, so over the Christmas break I had another crack at it. I sculpted a new bat logo out of Miliput, filled in some of the joints, and repainted Batsy in a cel-shaded style somewhat similar to Mike Mignola’s artwork. I did this by illuminating the figure from the top left and then tracing the shadows. I tried to paint him so that the effect works from all angles, but I think it’s most effective from the front and left. The colour palette is very limited: Vallejo Medium Sea Grey 70.870 and Black 70.950 for the suit, Flat Earth 70.983 and Charred Brown 72.045 for the utility belt and Basic Skin Tone 70.815 for the skin. By the way, it may not come across in the pictures, but at 30 cm Batsy ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gloomhaven characters

Back in the winter of 2020/2021, my wife and I played a lot of Gloomhaven. After several months of playing multiple games a week we put it away for a while, but recently we picked it back up again.  Gloomhaven is probably one of the best tabletop games I’ve played. The only downside in my mind is that it can easily take you 15 minutes to set up a scenario, especially if you don’t invest in some aftermarket box inserts to organise the literally thousands of tiles, tokens, cards and standees. But once you’ve set everything up, the game plays really well. Plus, I really like that it is a cooperative game in which the players need to work together to get through a scenario.   Anyway, the game comes with 18 plastic ‘heroic’ 28 mm or 32 mm scale miniatures. The monochrome grey plastic really stands out against the beautifully colourful floor tiles, so obviously these had to be painted... The plastic is a bit softer than your average model kit, but a lot harder than the soft plas...
Post a Comment
Read more