Wednesday 9 May 2012

Finnish field guns - basic paint coat


It's nice to see a 'herd' of models together at one time and is what has swayed me more to the war gaming side of the hobby than the individual display side of things. There is a weird attraction to seeing a group of vehicles or weapons like this together.

Anyway, here's a group of my WW2 Finnish Army field guns. These include two of my light Putilov 76mm guns and three LeFH18 105mm medium howitzers (by Revell and Armourfast). This is just the field green base coat - Humbrol's Dark Green spray - but it does bring out the detail nicely.



I will be keeping these guns a plain field green with appropriate weathering and will resist the temptation to apply the pretty Finnish 3 colour camo pattern to them. I guess for war gaming there may be an argument to apply a standard camo across your army to aid easy identification of units, certainly the guys at the Flames of War site could not help themselves and use the 3 colour scheme on their Putilov guns...

Above: The Flames of War team could not help themselves but applied the
distinctive Finnish 3-colour camo scheme to this field gun. This despite the fact
that the Finnish Army actually used a rather more mundane field green.

A simple field green may not be the most attractive scheme but using this camo on ALL my Finnish models just wouldn't be authentic. One thing though, my flash has turned Humbrol's Dark Grey into something a lot more like mid-grey, I will have to adjust my lighting in my next snaps to get a truer reflection of the green coat I have applied.

1 comment:

  1. Plain (dark) field green was used for vast majority of Continuation War and the 3 color scheme entered use only (late) 1943. The tank brigade where the tanks used the same camo I'd say is extremely likely to have had their artillery equipment in this camo but I doubt that ALL our artillery were painted in 3 color.

    Artillery colors:
    Winter War -I'd go for plain green
    Attack phase ('41) - still green
    Retreat phase (summer of '44) -3 color but plain green still not unlikely

    Artillery Museum's site is under renovation but their Facebook page still works:
    http://www.facebook.com/pages/Museo-Militaria-Suomen-Tykist%C3%B6museo/10150111742560311

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