here's my Trumpeter KV-2 built OOB, nothing special. Painted with White Ensign paints, and weathered with Mig pigments. The figure is from Trumpeter aswell.. comments and the like welcome!

The photos are too blurry to say...

Looks decent but as Lisec said a little more focus would help.

What part of New York?

well I guess I can't edit my post to add some better pics here, but here they are... don't know why my camera/lighting and green paint don't mix too well!!!

these pics should be better!

















hope these are better...

Jeff, I live in Glens Falls NY

I like it. What kind of tracks are those, plastic link or vinyl. They look very good to me!

It could perhaps have benfited from a turret marking or slogan to add a splash of colour variety, but that aside it looks to me like a very nice OOB build and paint job. I like it.

Hi,

stay away from those turret slogans on KV-II's, as there is no evidence of at least one vehicle showing one! Even tactical signs were very rare, so 'boring' plain green will be the best choice. (Altough you want to depict a 'what if' tank ;-))

Volker

exactly why I stayed away from any markings. Soviet stuff rarely had them! Besides, the slogans provided are grammatically incorrect and make no sense to most russian people!

Oooops!!

Well that's me well and truly put in my place!!

Actually you are right that at least some of them are a bit dodgy-looking, but I have seen some that look OK (at least to me with my very basic, rudimentary knowledge of Russian).

If this is a Trumpeter kit, I found that their larger decals such as "Za Stalina" (For Stalin) or "Bey Fashistskuyu Gadinu" (Kill the Fascist scum) are very accurate, at least gramatically.

However, there was this one particular decal on one of the KV-1 variants, that had a long message something along the lines of "From workers of collective farm such and such to soldier such and such..." . Trumpeter mutilated the message into an utter grammatic mess. Seeing that on a tank is sure to crack a russian speaker up..

Yep. I'd go along with all that.

Volker you say that "there is no evidence ....." etc. etc.

But let's face it, there's no concrete, incontrovertible historical evidence of a lot of things - even where and when certain camo schemes were used and what color combinations were used is still a matter of great debate among modellers / military historians.

You hear / read it a lot - things like (just for example) "were they blue numbers with white borders .... or green numbers with yellow borders??"

Quite often no-one really knows for sure and there's no way of finding out with 100% certainty, yet people still get really hung up on such minutiae and spend ages conducting painstaking research - at which point the danger of terminal "AMS" sets in.

Same with KV-2s with slogans: Concrete photographic evidence may be thin on the ground or even non-existent - but who's to say that there weren't any??!

To my mind, as long as it (a) looks good, (b) is at least plausible and above all (c) you're happy with your build - then does it really matter?

And James, I still think it's a nice build - even without a slogan

Hi Steve,

no doubt, the primary benchmark for every modeler should be himself and nothing else. It's simply a matter of settling your own claim.
Personally I find it exciting to search for references of a certain vehicle or type of and to build a kit according to that as good as I can.
So, as you would have liked the KV-II depicted with a turret's slogan, I think it's better left without. Not a big trouble.
I would be surprised, if a pic pops up, showing one. That hence we are talking about a type of vehicle of which less than 350 have been build and most abandonded or destroyed in the first days of war, when those slogans haven't been that popular (for prop-reasons - sometimes it seems as if most of the destroyed tanks lacked slogans and most of the intact, pictured by soviets, had ). And most of them have been photographed by german soldiers! (http://mechcorps.rkka.ru/files/kv2/kv2.htm)
I think, trumpeter (and other kitmakers, too) added slogans to that kits to make them more attractive, that's it.

By for now

Volker

Hi Volker,

I wasn't criticising anyone, so apologies if it came across like that.

I agree with what you say, research can indeed be fun - but only up to a point. I'm not one to worry (for example) about whether a particular vehicle's track pin heads were round or hexagonal, or whether a Tiger I had 95 or 96 track links.

I mean - who's counting??!

Certainly not my girlfriend, friends or other visitors to my place - who are basically the only people apart from myself who see my builds (though one of these days I'll post some pics up here when I can get hold of a decent camera to take some).

Personally speaking, the time I have available to dedicate to my hobby is limited. Therefore I'd rather spend as much of that time as I can actually building & painting, as opposed to getting bogged down in endless hours of researching into nitty-gritty details that no-one else who sees my work is going to look for or even notice.

But that's just me. Maybe a major lottery win would change my outlook - given that I'd then have much more spare time on my hands, LOL!!

Catch you later!

actually from what I"ve read on some forums, the KV-2 decals from Trumpeter read "For THE Stalin" not "For Stalin"... Anyway, it's a moot point, my sources didn't have decals, this one doesn't either!

Nice KV-II James. The second set of images show up the details nicely, but maybe the hue is a little off?
To decal, or not to decal ... that is the question. Personally I think you made the right choice not using them. The big advantage of decals ... apart from being authentic (in this case authenticity is not using them) they add contrast to a monotone colour and break up big areas of flat colour.
Placing something strategically on this area would do the same job ... tarps, recognition flag, figure, etc. I really like the pose of the figure you´ve used here, but one more could be added, looking in the same direction and standing casually on the side-fenders, adding the contrast and detail, missed by the lack of decals.