Priming and Painting my Konarmiya

I've been painting 20mm Revolutionary Russian figures in my spare time of late; the weekend project was cleaning, washing, and assembling two packs of "Haron/Orion" Russian Red Cavalry and one pack of Strelets Mounted Terek Cossacks. These last were made for the Crimean War, but they'll do for "Red Cossacks" in a pinch.

The Red Cavalry is supposed to represent the Konarmiya, or First Red Cavalry division, a fearsome all-cavalry shock army of the original early Red Army during its revolutionary phase. John Kuprowski and I are working on a Russo-Polish war game with me taking the Russian side and John the Polish (with a last name like Kuprowski, he's a natural). I decided I needed to "represent" these guys in my Russian Revolutionary Army.

On somebody's recommendation I tried Tamiya's spray primer. We'll see how it turns out. It's supposed to be good with plastics.

I'm hating the cheap plastic these new East European and Russian figure companies are using. You have to be incredibly careful with the exacto knife or you'll slice through a critical piece in the blink of an eye. One of my Red Cavalry men is missing a foot because of my zealous knifework (and my thumb has a nicely healing slice in it as a result, this morning).

I've noticed this phenomena with the Eastern European/Ukrainian/Russian plastic kits and plastic soldiers. They use a much softer plastic than Monogram/Revell/Tamiya/Airfix does. I've actually ruined a FT-17 kit I bought through ebay when I was trying to remove it from the sprues with an exacto. My language was.. "colorful"..

Still, they look right and hopefully will paint up well. Any ideas about uniform color? I'm working of a sort of greyish green acrylic from Testors.







(Images from the Plastic Soldier Review)