Snipers of Stalingrad ASL Style

As you already know, I had some Snow Effects for Christmas and wanted to have another go with them and had promised a fellow ASL player a set of Stalingrad Deluxe Snipers, that was well over a year ago but I have finally started work on them and this is the result of the Russian.

This is not the base I showed the start of a few weeks ago, that is for the bonus round in the painting challenge. Timing has never been my strong suit so here you find me spending hours on just the one figure rather than getting the lead out but I don't mind at all as I have been having a blast and indeed I can feel my painting batteries recharging as I go.

The power lines and pole are all fully scratch built. The pole being two paintbrush handles with balsa added to one pole with brass pin heads pushed in. Fuse wire then makes up the cables painted Black Grey with bits showing through silver. The walls and pavement are Linka again with Model Display Product clay bricks added for the loose bricks, often broken into pieces to keep to scale with the undersized Linka.

To sink the base of the figure into something I made a door (see the door knob?) cutting out a section and then later covering with snow allowing it to escape easy detection. This was pinned to a stack of bricks and also gives the needed height. I used an old business card to add wallpaper and hide all the joins in the wall pieces.

I draped a loose power cable into the building to give the impression that a fair sized part of the roof and upper floors were missing to help explain the snow in the room. I like how the wall has come out looking really dirty without looking over worked, one of the few times I stepped away from a process without wishing I had done it sooner.

On standard Sniper Reminders, the figure is the main attraction but on these they tend to take second place to the scene you are trying to set. So far I have only done a total of four of these and right from the start I planned never to repeat a scene so these are certainly one off's. I may use the downed power line again but never in the same way. 

The window is from a pack provided by Warbases and is in fact two separate windows. One I have cut most of the window sections out and the other I have shaved the corner off one third of the second window and stuck in to give the imprecision of an open window that fits the frame. 

Again I have used snow effects to cover up joints and help set the scene, I really like the snow effects and will be getting a lot of use out of them when the Baker Company Kickstarter items start to arrive.

Hopefully the customer will like him and it will bring him luck when he play's, well unless I ever get to play opposite him LOL.

So all in all a very fun distraction that was more of a modelling exercise than paint up. I have another one for Stalingrad to do, this being the German and one in France in the Bocage both of which have the figures almost finished and I know what I plan to do for the bases so it's just putting them into reality.