28mm Sniper Reminders - The New Batch

It's been about a week since these were shown on Curt's blog so I guess it's safe to show them now  ;-) I have to admit that I am struggling with time to blog, paint and do the normal stuff. My working day has me in near constant contact with China, especially the morning when I am either on Skype or traditional phone trying to get information or more often items in my mitts. Right now it's crazy daft as The Chinese New Year looms (31st January) and that means no new shiny for six weeks so it's very hectic and lots of working late or more often very early starts (China is eight hours ahead) meaning I am busted for the evening. Worse still I have a trade show coming up in the UK where I am away for five nights then it's off to Frankfurt the following day for four days so I am guessing I won't be doing much painting, oh um.

But I have managed to turn out some figures at least. these are all Black Tree Miniatures unless I say otherwise. I have to admit to being very happy with the quality of their figures and the level of detail they add to their figures. I am planning on salting away money every month till they have another 50% discount and then I am going to order big as they so rarely disappoint on quality.

As you can see, you often get a lot of kit to paint, no basic sculpting job here. However they have a few niggles. With a lot of the figures you get a mixed selection so often it includes lying down figures and with the Russian's a mix of summer and winter uniforms. I don't know about the mixed uniform but I asked for no lying down in my last order and was rewarded with standing and kneeling only so it's quite possible you would get the same level of service with uniform. Certainly I would have no qualms ordering the army deal with a few requests in an attempt to get what I required.

These paint up reasonably fast and the paint flows well allowing the folds of the uniform to come to light. The guy on the right looks a right slow burner, the body language and expression on his face really make you think he is having real trouble reloading that rifle, maybe he was the one who had to pick up the rifle?

Again just lovely looking figures and plenty to get your teeth into. The range is reasonably large so you can get a lot of figures without worrying about too many repeats.

The stars on the caps are soft enough that you can ignore them, or simply file the detail off but here I painted it on. The figure on the left is my favourite of this batch and I am tempted to keep him. I am looking forward to seeing how the Baker Company early Russians size up in case I can mix some of the Blacktree into them if required.

The tufts are all the Tajima1 ones I blogged about around a week ago but I have mixed up the sizes and I am as happy with these as I was with the earlier ones I have used on the 6 and 15mm figures.

Here we have the one Artizan figure (I think) on the left and I have had a go with the Scenic Snow by Deluxe Materials that I blogged about just after Christmas. I am planning on doing the Winter War miniatures with a similar amount of snow on the base as these as it looks more interesting than full snow and looks better for it as well I think.

Just the one on the right has winter clothes with the other having to mate do with a fur hat, at least he has better kit than the poor Germans.

The last three are all in snow smocks and so I added more snow effects to their bases but I don't think it carries as well. I enjoyed doing various white tones to the smocks and in real life you can see the different shades that bit better.

The true winter figures were actually Sniper sets and not in the normal mix and I have painted some of these with the brown sniper outfit in the past so they work both ways anyway.