From GregB: Stug III In "Winter Colours"

1/56 scale plastic StuG model - kit from Warlord Games.

Greetings all - it was great of Curt to kick off this "Quarantine Challenge" and I'm pleased to have the chance to extend our painting experience together in the community here.  As we hunker down, let's use the shared experience of our hobby to keep our spirits up and connections alive!

An iconic piece of WW2 kit...the unique front silhouette of the StuG.

During the recently-concluded 10th Edition of the AHPC, I embarked on a new project (as one often does), diving into 28mm WW2 skirmish gaming after years and years of hesitating. I was specifically interested in starting a collection of figures in winter kit, and my major interest is the later war period on the Eastern Front, so I started off with Germans.  

The AHPC is a great driver for me with these kinds of new projects - the comments and feedback from the other Challengers really helps you me moving, and the dreadful conditions of a Canadian Prairie winter certainly added to the inspiration to paint things in winter gear. I went from zero figures to a pretty complete mechanized platoon by the end of the Challenge - not a bad start at all!

The plastic kit has lots of nice detail, but if you look closely at the bottom right I could NOT get the hull sections to sit together smoothly...f*cking plastic models...I always mess them up...

But with any hobby project there is always "one more" thing that you don't seem to get to, right? I had finished infantry, and Hanomags, for my Germans, but they were lacking AFVs.  I don't plan to do a lot of tanks or anything in 28mm - I play other scales for that - but they still needed at least one to feel like my first phase of this new project was truly accomplished. So here we are, a Stug III from Warlord Games - this is a plastic kit in (sigh) 1/56 scale.

I left the schurzen plates off of the model, as there was no reasonable way to mount them and expect that they would not be immediately snapped off on the gaming table...

This kit was relatively straightforward to assemble, although I still found a way to struggle with it. That's just me...any normal human will find this kit easy to build. BUT there is one exception to that statement: it's the schurzen plates. I really wanted to have those on the StuG, but as you can see, the Warlord model has flimsy plastic connection points. These closely mimic the real way those plates were mounted, so model is realistic. But in terms of wargaming-table logistics, this approach is delusional, as they would snap off the second someone tries to pick up the model. Anyway, it looks great without the plates, and I might figure out a more robust solution later.  So I built the plates, but have left them to the side for now.

75mm gun will help take on enemy armour...

I threw my usual painting recipe for winter AFVs on the model...as I have said before, I like my winter vehicles to look like a mess, because winter IS a mess - a total f*cking mess. F*ck winter. Snow is pretty on Christmas Cards (and there are days like that), but anything that drives or moves through the winter will be mucky in no time at all. I like my vehicles to reflect that.

Here is the vehicle along with a couple of the infantry models painted during the recently completed AHPC X.

I wanted to start with a StuG for the Germans because StuGs look cool and they were a pretty common AFV (insofar as AFVs were available to the Germans late in the war).  I tend to neglect StuGs in my WW2 collections in other scales, so I thought I would start with this iconic vehicle in 28mm. My late war Germans now have some AFV support, and are ready for a game...whenever that might be possible...

Ready for action on the table! I'm sure it won't get knocked out on the first turn or anything like that...I mean, when has that ever happened to newly-painted vehicles, right?

Thanks for visiting the Quarantine Challenge, and for looking at this post! I hope to share more painting with all of you as this little mini-challenge goes on. Cheers.

GregB