Slightly left-field but this is a Blog after all

A quiet few days since I last posted but I’ll try and catch up over the weekend with the posts for the missing days – keeping to one or two posts a day seems to work, it’s not overloading me and yet there’s some food for thought.Most of the people I know who paint well and yet manage to produce a lot of output usually have either the TV or radio on as background noise. I can’t do that at all, I’ll find I get distracted enough to want to see what is actually happening on screen or with radio, I’ll get frustrated with the crap songs or worse end up with blood pressure issues listening to talkradio. So for me, what I do is crank up Winamp or put on a CD of mp3s.

My current playlist in both cases (I burn my playlists to CD) is something new, something old, something blue, something borrowed:

Artist – Album
• A Perfect Circle – Mer de Noms
• A Perfect Circle – Thirteenth Step
• A Perfect Circle – Emotive
• Nine Inch Nails – Pretty Hate Machine
• Nine Inch Nails – The Downward Spiral
• Nine Inch Nails – With Teeth
• Rammstein – Am Anfang War Das Feuer
• Rammstein – Reise Reise
• Rammstein – Sehnsucht
• Simple Minds – Life In A day
• Style Council – Boxed Set
• The Killers – Hot Fuss
• Tool – Undertow
• Tool – Aenima
• Tool – Salival
• Tool – Lateralus
• Tool – 10,000 days

I’ve been on an industrial kick lately, and including the Style Council breaks it up nicely especially as late Style Council segues into the proto-house movement after a couple of excellent café jazz albums. I still haven’t got around to ripping my Glenn Miller and Piaf Collections but I should do when I start really getting into the whole music matches theme for painting.

P-J

Soviet Tank Camo redux

Apart from the two 1941 armies, I’ve two more planned for the next 18 months. The first will be a 1944 Guards breakthrough unit during Bagration composed almost entirely of T34s and ISUs with the second being a bog standard force from the spring battles of 1942. I was going to make the latter a dedicated Stalingrad fighting unit but the camo scheme depicted below really appeals as it’s so crisp and evocative of the cold wastes.

T34m42(cupola), 4th Guards Tank Army. Lvov, Summer 1944

T34m41, two colour camouflage, West Front, Spring 1942

I can see a lot of potential fun doing these two armies, especially as the late war one will be so focussed on the vehicular aspect and have desantniki as the sole infantry component – a few Shturmoviks may be necessary however. I’m still working on what the exact fit out of the armies will be but there’ll be as much variation in terms of wheels, turrets and factory variatiions as possible.