Where can I get Soviet style chess pieces like these

Beautiful job, utpic! Love the color.

Thanks UpcountryRain. The whole process was quite a learning curve. (It’s hand painted - even black pieces). 

https://thechessstore.com/search.php?search_query=soviet&section=product

I suppose this thread is coming to an end: a question, suggestions, discussions, acquisition, restoration and final display. I'm a happy chappy, totally chuffed with this set now. Thank you all for participating!

I  conclude with a before and after image. Before was #82 and here is after (board-box cleaned up too):

Very nice end result!

In case anyone is curious, I used several coats of Sennelier Artist's Shellac-based Inks, brushed on with an artist's filbert bristle brush with fine sanding in between coats (see #79 for state of pieces before application). The black, oddly enough, which is pitch black, is Sennelier Grey. I mixed 3 inks to get that honey orange-red brown: Senegal Yellow+Orange+Olive  Green (mixture =20+20+1). The natural sheen comes from the shellac inks, which increases proportionately to the number of coats being applied.

(and the answer to my question regarding iPhone is: to use the zoom function which takes the camera out of wide angle mode. I.e. one shouldn't take picture too close to chess pieces. Stand a bit back and zoom in with the camera and you will finally get what  you see :-).  

One caution regarding the use of the shellac inks: they are highly transparent, which means that the base colour of the wood you are painting on is going to influence the resulting colour significantly. Nice thing is, one can always remove what one has painted, even after it has dried, with denatured alcohol (meths).

sound67, I couldn't disagree with you more. To apply the term "handmade" and "craftsman" to CB is really a misnomer because they use machine-cut dyes. It is irrelevant whether a person applies it on the piece or a machine does. It is mechanical and produces identical results each time. That is why their method of production is so unsuited to replicating Soviet sets.  

It is like comparing an oil painting by an artist with an image which was produced by applying the Photoshop oil paint filter to a photo. 

So when CB decide to reproduce the Tal Latvian set because all the same pieces are identical they have to get the shapes and proportions spot on - they cannot point to THE set which they copied as justification. There is no standard prototype to copy from. (The set they copied had no piece the same as the other - so which one did they choose to copy?) And, as it happens, the end result has a basic fault: the knights dominance is overemphasised and the bishops are dwarfed. So much for "MUCH better quality".

utpic, sorry to change the subject here, but what kind of paint stripper did you use to remove the varnish from your pieces? Did you just brush it on? Soak them? Just curious, thanks!

I stripped the orange and painted over the black. The orange was surprisingly easy to remove - just brushed them with denatured alcohol (methylated spirits) and within a minute or two all the colour was gone (they were obviously just shellac applied to wood). I don't think that would have happened with the black pieces (where a black paint or dye was probably used), there one would probably require a proper paint/varnish stripper.  See my post on #98 for details on method.

Last twist in the tale: 

Although the gloss was a definite improvement on the first transformation I just could not get to like the brown - it just didn't suit the pieces. So I went for "soviet-red". Now I'm happy and I can hang up my boots! :-)

Nice job, utpic. Did you use Sennelier Artist's Shellac-based Inks again?

Thanks UpcountryRain. Yes I did, except that I added Liquitex acrylic paint to the ink to get the exact colour I wanted. One then has to watch that the ink does not get too thick - so I added the Sennelier ink transparent medium.

To be honest the best way do coloured chess pieces like these would probably be to paint them with flat acrylic straight which would remove all signs of wood grain underneath like the black pieces, but I felt somehow that with chess pieces from the 1950s one somehow should let the age show through a little.

I haven't seen this particular set in this red - only other ones. But I find it very appealing for these forms. The picture does not capture the nuance of the colour: it has a slight magenta-violet tinge.

this looks like Noj Dubronvik 1950 they make handmade sets high quality. Check it https://www.noj.si/?mod=catalog&action=productDetails&ID=12

https://www.thechessempire.com/russian-series.html ?