When I bought this kit, one thing was clear to me that I am not going to paint this model in Russian Green, that would simply be bit boring. Somehow I immediately knew that the kit is going to be in one of its mid-east versions, and the alternative I liked most is Syrian vehicle.

There is a lot of documentation available online as Syria is unfortunately for quite long time embroiled in bloody civil war and thanks to internet and social media we are almost daily confronted with its reality…

One particularly useful site is blog, which I have already mentioned here – Military in the Middle East. You can find here a lot of reference photographs of vehicles of all kinds and of all the countries in his part of the world and BMP is not an exception –  see plenty of photos here (I have borrowed the photograph above from this site).

Quick google search will also point you to two very well done BMP-1 models by other modellers – see here and here. I was very much inspired by these two pieces and I believe you will be able see the influence on my finished models.

Originally I planned to paint the BMP in light desert yellow colour (it is always easier to achieve better contrast and weathering effects with lighter base colour) and then add camouflage, but I quickly realized that the process in which these vehicles were actually painted was exactly opposite – they were most likely delivered to Syria in their original Russian green and then the camo was painted over it. So I decided to follow this process in my painting phase. Out of the whole variety of vehicles you can see on different photographs, I will go for bit lighter finish, some of the pictures from Syria clearly show some BMPs having very dark green base colour, most likely resulting from prolonged use and abuse of the vehicle. I find these would be bit too dark to reproduce in scale.

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