A slight hiccup with the helmet shield

I referred back to my friend, Mike Grzebien, for some clarity on the shield that should be on the side of the helmet. The box art shows a red shield with a swastika but I felt that this was incorrect. His advice was as follows:

"Typically, I would say during the Battles for Kharkov, most individuals in Waffen SS units would have been wearing the single-decal helmet with the runic shield on the right side and no "swastika" shield.  A quick flip through a few of my books on WSS units in Kharkov confirms this. The fur lined "Charkov" anorak, introduced for wear in February 1943, was only issued to Waffen SS field units and would not normally be worn by regular Wehrmacht infantry, so your MG42 carrier should definitely be depicted as Waffen SS with the runic shield on the helmet. "

So, off I went. Mike had given me some images to look at but I needed something bigger - so I fired up Google and found just what I wanted. I then did the following:

1. brought the image into Adobe Photoshop to clean it up
2. placed this image on a page in Adobe Illustrator and traced over it to get a proper drawing of the shield
3. reduced it to the required size
4. thought about printing a decal but I haven't had too much luck when printing tiny decals on my printer so I printed it up on plain paper.
5. stuck it onto the helmet using Gator's Grip acrylic glue
6. sent it off to Mike for comment

I got an e-mail back as follows:

"Excellent paintwork Dave! However, you're probably not going to like me for this, but the runes are backwards.  Oooops."

So, I scraped the paper off the helmet, flipped the image in Illustrator, printed it out again and glued it on. The whole image was then given a coat of Vallejo flat varnish - I had previously used Xtracrylix flat but that still left it with a sheen but Vallejo flat varnish is first class and gives a really matt finish. I then gave the rifle a coat of satin varnish and the stand a coat of gloss.

This is the final result. I am quite proud of this (seeing a photo at this size shows up all the little details which you don't see in a normal view).