Pico Size, Mega Quality
How do you say "Oh! Crap" in Hebrew? 3mm IDF Centurians and M3 Halftracks with Navwar 1/300 Su-7
Last year I picked up some 3mm artillery and 23mm AA guns for use as ground targets in my CY6! – Jet Age games. My aircraft models are 1:300 / 1:285 / 6mm, so I decided to go with 3mm to get that “stuff down there below us” scale effect. I had heard good stuff about the Oddzial Osmy stuff from Poland and the pictures on the website at PicoArmor certainly looked good, so I ordered up a few. They definitely looked great and so recently picked up some more stuff (painting half on commission for Scott even payed for the order). This time I got a variety of tanks, soft skins, APCs, and infantry.
The quality of these little models is simply astounding. The details are exaggerated a little so that these paint up really nicely and very quickly. In fact, it’s safe to safe I spent more time on the bases for these than I did on the models themselves.
Three bases of Israeli Centurions
Egytian Infantry and BTR-50 PK armored personel carriers
Size Comparison - M3 halftracks shown in 15mm/1:100, 6mm/1:285, and 3mm/1:600.
I really like how these turned out and now I’m considering getting some specifically to do some higher level wargaming than my usual tactical scale stuff with 15mm. At the platoon/base scale, you could actually base these at 1:1 for the vehicles, with 3-5 vehicles on a base representing a platoon. The same basing would also give a much better appreciation of size for doing company / base scale gaming as well. With careful choice of basing, I could probably use these with Look Sarge, No Charts or Piquet Field of Battle: WWII. My first thought is to use these to do some actions from Barbarosa. Using the FOB:WWII TOE’s, I should be able to field an entire Soviet Tank Corp for around $80… Something to think about a little…
Now more Gratuitous Eye Candy
Israeli M3 Halftracks
Egyptian T-55 main battle tanks
Close up view of IDF Centurions
Close up of Egyltian Infantry (using Soviet infantry pack). One lesson learned from this first batch is to always work in good light, lest you glue half the infantry down 'advancing to the rear'
Front and back views of 152mm artillery and the artillery command
Air defense units - ZSU-23-4 self-propelled AAA, ZPU-23 23mm AAA, and SA-7 man-portable surface to air missile teams
Soviet-made GAZ-66 and ZiL-157 Trucks
Israeli Mirages look to do some 30mm interdiction on an Egytian supply column
11 responses to “Pico Size, Mega Quality”
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Straight from the Painting Desk
Test model for 3mm Caunter camo pattern
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Repple Depple 
I am sold on those Oddzial Osmy. The detail is great and quite inexpensive.
Dont hurt your eyes! those are tiny. Looking good 🙂
The O8 stuff really is quite remarkable. I’m definitely hoping Marcin will sculpt up some more air defense for both moderns and WWII. Some 3mm SA-2 or SA-3 would be awesome.
Absolutely superb. I use these models myself but my paintwork is much worse. Your bases are also far better than my own. I am currently redoing my forces and would really appreciate some detail of your painting regime – model preparation, paint manufacturer, shading process etc, then a tutorial on your desert basing system. Thank you for sharing these with us.
Andrew,
I’ll try and fill you in as best I can. For preparation I didn’t do much other than clip off the easily removed bits od flashing. The metal that O8 uses is really hard, so I’ve not tried to remove the small mold lines. For these models I went ahead and based them first then spray primed the whole thing. I use krylon white and I suspect that using a light primer really helps with small models.
I used a pretty simple scheme for painting these. Basically I painted the whole model in the base color then washed the whole thing with my Magic wash (about 1:1 Future:water pigmented to taste with a mix of black and brown ink). After that dried I did a drybrush with the original color followed by a lighter shade of the base color. For the models with camo patterns, I applied the colors as thinned paints so that the shadows and highlights of the underlying base color showed through. Lastly I picked out details such as tire, windows, gun barrelsn etc. I use a whole mish-mash of different types of paints. The Israeli base color is Testors Acryll armor sand, the Egyptian base color was custom mixed using craft paints, and the Egyptian trucks and infantry are a craft called Linen – which brand I do not remember, but even if I did it is likely that the formuation changed in the years since I bought that one.
For basing these I went into my sand collection and mixed up a custom mix that is mostly a very fine sand I got from eEast Texas (and have moved all the way across the country to Virginia) mixed with some coarser playground sand. I used spackling or acryllic gel medium to blend in the bases on the infantry and gun castings. I then glued on my sand mixture using white glue. Vehicles were glued to the sand using medium viscosity superglue. After the vehicles were painted, I painted the entire base in a beige color (I used a couple of different ones) and then drybrushed with a couple of progressively lighter shades of tan/beige. The larger particles from the playground sand I picked out with a very light grey to make them look like stones. Finally I added a little color with some small patches of flocking (Woodline scenics fine).
Hope that helps
Brian
Thank you for this: I will be trying your painting tecnique for my own models. Have you thought of doing a blog entry demonstrating these techniques with accompanying pictures? Don’t ask for much, do we! Again, thanks for sharing, and great work. AT
I think those are absolutely spectacular! I love the idea of smaller figures closer to the ground scale, especially for larger scale games. I dabbled in some 2mm stuff, but really found it impractical for large table games.
Besides, I already have 25mm and 15mm WW2 figures painted up, and a few 6mm figures…do I really need another scale?!?!
Andy,
I think that the O8 stuff is such a cut above other smaller than 6mm scales that you can still use them on a larger table, especially if you put them on a large base with several models and room for a base label…
“Do I need another scale ?” Is one of those rhetorical questions like “Do we have enough beer?”
Brian
lest you glue half the infantry down ‘advancing to the rear’… lol
very inspiring… looking for my next project.
I prefer to think of it as an all-around defense…