I've been looking around the net for painting ideas for a Trumpeter 1/35 KV-2 that i'm planning on building (havent bought it yet), and i've come across tha story of a particular KV-2 that i've decided to model.

It was from the 2nd tank division of the Russian army, and on June 23-24 1941 it single handedly held up the entire 6th German tank devision near Russaynjay, southern Lithuania. The only way that the Germans destroyed it was to mount a decoy attack while they set up their second Flak 88 and then destroyed the KV-2.

The photos that i've seen of the tank seem to have the slogan on the turret sanded off, and i can't pick out what colour it was. Can someone please help me out here?

As far as I am aware of, no KV-2 ever had a patriotic slogan painted on it.

As to the colour - I use Tamiya Dark Green or Model Master Russian Armor green. These are solely my preference - I don't believe that there was a "standard" paint colour used.

if you look at the turret side in the following photo (taken from MilitaryPhotos.net), there seems to be white writing that has been sanded away. it appears to be a slogan, or it could be German graffiti.



i cant quite make out the colour of the tank. it looks too light to be Russian Green, so it could be the light grey that the Russians sometimes used.

thanks for the input anyway Grant. i'll paint it Russian green just to be on the safe side.

wait, this painting by David Pentland depicts the tank in a light Russian grey, so i'll paint it this colour.



thanks for caring enough to post Grant

Hi , in all my research spread over many years and thousands of photos of the KV2 , I have never come across any ref to a light grey it is always Russian green various shades due to pigment use or lack of . As to Slogans again in my ref photo file not a single slogan can be seen . Yes to German graffiti . The only item seen and very rarely is a Air rec marks on the top of the turret either a white circle or triangle mostly on the hatch . Hope this helps clear up some of the myths . cheers ian

Other photos show a dark colour so we can be pretty safe in saying the KV-2 was in the usual dark green, there are colour photos, but I'm not entirely sure that they aren't tinted.

Some other things we can be sure of are, the grafitti on the turret is German, there are shots in which the turret is totally clean, then there are ones like this with German chalkings, which obviously got added to since the partially erased grafitti in your photo is different



and also that there is some sort of Soviet air recognition marking on the turret roof as some of it shows on the hatch.

David

hmm, i'll agree that russian green is the dominant colour that these tanks were painted.

Ian, is it possible that the paint could have faded or the pigment non existant in the paint when it was applied? its just that i've come across a build of a Trumpeter KV-2 that is all grey, and i'm all confused because it was built by a supposed "proffessional" and presented in a modeling magazine.

http://www.missing-lynx.com/gallery/russia/kv2jl_1.html

Here's a photo of the same tank before being tagged



To me Jay Laverty's tank looks a greyish green, and he admits in his articles in Military Modelling that he's a modeller rather than a reseacher of colour schemes.

David

ok, thanks mate. i'm hopefully getting the KV-2 tomorrow.