Blood, Guts, & Glory Painting Challenge: The Remaining Forces To celebrate the release of Blood, Guts, & Glory the members of the Battlefront Studio decided to hold a 24-hour painting challenge themed around the forces available in the new book. However, some people decided to take advance of opportunity to either complete other painting projects that had been haunting them for some time or get ahead for future projects Battlefront had planned. In this series of articles we share with you the experiences that took place during these 24-hours. Learn more about Blood, Guts, & Glory here... Learn more about the American forces in the 24-hour painting challenge here... Learn more about the Germans forces in the 24-hour painting challenge here...

Chris Townley Mixed Tankovy Batalon from Eastern Front With all of the excitement around Blood, Guts, & Glory I found myself in quite a quandary, I already have a reasonably large US Tank Company half painted, but I also needed to get a new Mid-war army completed for our grand tournament. In the end the thought that I would be one of the designated splitters and head down a slightly different path and work on my tournament army – who could resist the chance to get half an army knocked out over the course of 24 hours! Learn more about Eastern Front here...

Chris' Mixed Tankovy Batalon Light Tankovy Companies 10x T-26S obr 1939: 205 points. 9x T-26S obr 1939: 190 points. Heavy Tankovy Company 6x KV-1e: 620 points. Tankovy Anti-tank Company 4x 76mm ZIS3 guns: 130 points.

Light Armoured Car Platoon    3x BA-64 75 points Armoured Car Company    10x BA-10M: 310 points Sporadic Air Support I-153: 90 points. Total Points: 1620 points

The plan for the day was to get three of the four companies finished – the KVs and both units of BAs. My theory was that working on three different but similar things would mean that I would remain interested thanks to the little bit of variation, but still get an economy of effort by using the same techniques.

The next challenge in the plan came from how I intended on painting them. Instead of going with the traditional green that you expect to see on Soviet tanks, I found some references to three-colour camo of green, brown and sand. The scheme was used in some Military Districts and whilst the practice started to die out as the war progressed I felt that a Mixed Tankovy Batalon of T-26s was a likely candidate for this scheme. Left: The three-colour camouflage on a T-26. Image courtesy of o5m6.de.

As for how I was going to do it, I had a plan of using a small mountain of blue tac and an airbrush – only time would tell if it was actually going to work out! ~ Chris. Below: Chris' trial KV-1e (right) and a work in progress (left).