From the above photo I have deepened the shadows further, which has defined the areas further.  I need to push the highlights closer to pure Space Wolf Grey as well which will make the contrast difference between the highlight and shadow significant.  I also think that for future models I will darken the red by adding more Dark Flesh to the mixture.  This should provide a greater contrast for the highlights and also bring the model more ‘earthly’ than it currently is.

Oh, as I’m aware that this is a test piece I’ve actually purchased a spare set of legs, a torso and a head so that I could remake this model

I’ve now started painting the red on the Terminator.  I’m using a recipe that was shown in White Dwarf a few issues back when Space Hulk was re-released.  The biggest drawback with this is that it is taking quite a while to actually paint.  Now in fairness the terminator has a lot of red on it – both wolf claws, a knee pad and a whole shoulder pad.  The overall effect is really smooth though, so it’s worth the time investment.

Although this miniature has consumed upwards of 8 hours time so far, I currently believe that painting power armoured marines will take less time providing I paint them in batches of between 4 and 6.  Many of the issues I’ve come across so far have been technique issues as well – how thin to make the paint, what area to cover to achieve a smooth blend, neatness etc – all of which will improve with practice.  I’ll also mix up a bottle of the base red colour I use which will also save some more time.

I have however managed to get some painting squeezed into this last week and a half, so I’m thankfully not having large gaps in my hobby again.  I’ve managed to undercoat a Wolf Guard Terminiator with pair of Wolf Claws as I though that this would allow me to practice one of every item that my marines would have – wolf pelts, lightening weapons, face, armour, etc.  Overall I’m fairly happy with the progress that I’m making, modern terminators are really large models so it’s taking quite a while.  The basing technique that I’ve chosen looks absolutly fantastic and genuinly looks like this Wolf Guard is stood on top slate.

I have however come across a rather annoying item in my armour colour – I use Fenris Grey in the first three phases of painting the armour, this paint is one of Games Workshops Foundation Paint range which have a really good coverage.  The biggest drawback with this range is that as soon as you add water the paint seems to separate into a multitude of hues, Fenris Grey for example ends up with a rich purple sat on top of a mid/light grey.  The real problem comes in that you end up constantly mixing the colour up – normally with your expensive W&N brush in order to maintain a consistent colour ending up on your model.  I need to do some investigation to see if the addition of a flow retarder or similar will slow down the speed of this separation.  The armour on this miniature is far from complete and although it only requires four colours in total, in order to achieve a smooth transition is going to take quite a bit of time for each miniature.  However I’m sure that with a bit of practice I’ll be churning out armour in more of a production line style than this first one.  Justing rethinking I’m probably closer to finishing the armour than I thought as each progressive layer actually covers less area than the one before.

All of the torso’s have been tidied up and gaps filled with green stuff.  The Skyclaws (5) are ready to glue onto their bases (more on that shortly) as is the smaller pack of Grey Hunters (5).  The larger pack of Grey Hunters (8) just need the shoulder pads glued on a few and appropriate heads selected and fitted.  This leaves the large pack of Blood Claws (14) which need a few more legs tidied up and then arms, shoulder pads and heads.  The scouts (10) need to be tidied up and assembled.  Finally the long fangs require quite a bit more work assembling than I originally thought.  So tonight I will be able to base up 18 models and have a futher 30 to so.  So 40% ish of the troop element of the army done.

On the subject of bases (I said in the last paragarh) I’ve worked out what I’m actually going to do.  After seeing a article on the internet I’ve baked a slab of Super Sculpy to about 4mm thick (rolled out with a beer bottle) which I’m snapping off small pieces with a pair of pliers.  I didn’t kneed it very thoroughly, which results in quite nice fracture lines when you snap it – almost simulating slate.  Now some people’s reaction might be “why don’t you just use slate” the answer is quite simple – I can bake Sculpy to have a flat bottom and relativly flat top – which glues onto a base much more successfully than slate does.  It’s lighter, easier to drill/cut/finish and finally more secure when you fix a model to it (which is actually the most important point).  I’m gluing the Sculpy to the base with superglue and putting a small pin into the foot of the marine and through the base (folded over underneath).  This results in a very firm and secure fixing – easily able to sustain being transported around in a case.  Another really nice effect is that the slab of Sculpy has a curved (i.e. not snapped) edge, which will give quite a cool effect when snow flocked.

Sadly I can’t see me making as much progress on my army again as this spurt of activity was due to having the house to myself for a whole weekend (a once a year occurance at best).  However I belive that I’ve broken the back of the task – at least from an assembly point of view.  This might sound peculiar, but the time consuming bit is sorting out the torso’s as they require gluing together, tidying up when dry and then filling – so two long-ish drying times before they can be used.  The Long Fang weapons are multipart and sadly look like they’re going to require quite a bit of green stuff to put together the Lascannons and Heavy Bolters.  The scouts are largely fixed posed (sadly), but this makes the assembly slightly more straight forward.  Blood Claws are pretty straight forward, a matter of gluing all of the bits together (probably an evenings work at a guess).

Now I normally have some kind of moan or gripe on my posts and this one is sadly no exception.  What has baffled me is the selection of regular bolters available on the new Wolf Pack sprues.  You get a total of 4 bolters on each sprue pair (of which you get two in each box).  Of these 4, two are molded on arms which point out in some direction (one up and one out), the other two are like the other tactical marines in that you get a pair of arms and the gun glues on.  What baffles me is the lack of variety that this gives you.  The ones that are the same as tactical arms do have some flexibility, but the arms with the guns attached have no change in them at all – resulting in you having to fix them in the direction the arm has been made in – in one case straight upwards :s  What I don’t understand is why they didn’t have all of the guns detached and arms separate.  The same actually goes for the selection of pistols on the sprue – you have a total of 6 plasma pistols in a box – why there is no pack that can have that many?  Why did GW not just have the arms and pistols separate.  It would have made the whole thing much more straight forward, both the production and construction aspects.  Plus you could have used pistol arms with bolters and had lots of potential.

The other thing that is starting to get my goat a little is that most legs put the emphasis into the left-hand shoulder being put in front – which means the bolter is held in the marine’s right hand and supported by the left – this is logical and it’s easy to put this natural motion into a marine to make it look dynamic and action packed.  However the vast majority of the new Space Wolf heads have pony tails or similar flowing to the left of their face – sounds good until you try and glue the bloody thing into place “Oh my marine is looking to the right, but the gun isn’t”.  The basic dynamism of the marine seems to have been forgotten when creating many of the heads.  I also want to know who the hell thought that a Space Wolf with flowing locks like a Bretonian Knight would be suitable?  It looks bloody rediculous by anybodies standard.

I don’t want to do Ragnar’s as to be honest it’s been done to death and is the GW standard army.  Logan Grimnar’s force would require dozens of Wolf Guard and finally Erik Moraki’s army should be stealthy and small – so hobson’s choice leaves Bjorn Stormwolf’s army.

The military actions of Bjorn Stormwolf’s Great Company are typified by noise, intimidation, and splendour.  Bjorn is a hairy, red-faced mountain of muscle to whom calm and introspection are foreign concepts.  He has taken the Thunderwolf as his symbol, for he too is a creature of might and ferocity over stealth.

Bjorn fills a silence with his booming voice ust as completely as he fills his ornate suit of Terminator armour.  He has been know to interrupt  Imperial dignitaries with a loud belch (or worse) if they begin to bore him.  Bjorn’s spectacular assaults reflect his impatient and aggressive nature, and invariably include lots of heavy weapons, bikes and Vindicators – essentially anything that makes a great deal of noise.  The Great Wolf always employs Bjorn for frontal assaults rather than stealth missions favoured by Erik Morkai, which the Stormwolf dismissively refers to as ‘whelp-work’

So with the exception of a large block of scouts my army isn’t too far off a suitable army.  The other thing that is nice is that I like is that it means that I can have a good bit of fun with converting Wolf Guard in terminator armour.  The conversion of Stormwolf himself should also be an exciting challenge as well.

Overall including the Battle Force that I’m getting tomorrow I will only be needing 1 more razorback and a plastic jump pack to have well over a 2,000 point army (17 power armoured marines and two drop pods worth) – the bits for it anyway, I still need to put them together!  It looks like I’ve only got a handful of things that I *have* to do this weekend, so potentially have 2 whole days and 3 evenings which I can use to construct an army – mwu hahaha.  One thing that has dawned on me is that I can actually put out all of my army on the dining room table as nobody is going to be wanting to need it, it should mean that I get a much clearer idea of where I am throughout the weekend.

I have also chanced across quite a clever article on how to make the main weapon of the Razorback magnetised, so that it can be swaped out should I want to.  I’m going to try and make fairly large portions of my vehicles magnetised as it will ultimately give me more flexibility with which to chop and change should the need arise.

I’ve done a bit of research on this in the past, but have never found anything that for me looks right along with being relativly straight forward to paint.  However ‘Countersunk81′ on the Cool Mini or Not forums recently posted up a classic Sergeant mini with what I think is quite a good ‘middle of the road’ colour scheme.  Being nosey, I asked how he painted the armour which he explains in his reply.  However to repeat it here for convienience, it’s basically a variant on the Games Workshop scheme recently shown in an issue of White Dwarf…

Basecoat of Fenris Grey (this is a foundation paint so has good coverage).
Wash of Fenris Grey & Scorched Brown – applied in the resesses of the miniature.
Highlight through to Shadow Grey.
Highlight through to Space Wolves Grey.

I think that the important thing to ensure is that intermedary stages are used to ensure a smooth blend, i.e. a mix of Fenris Grey and Shadow Grey rather than going straight to that colour.  The Space Wolf Grey will be a proper edge highlight, with the Shadow Grey adding some blue to the armour.

The other thing that I really like is the base is detailed, but not over the top in look – something that would look good for any miniature.  To this effect I’m going to try and replicate this, by baking a sheet of Super Sculpey in the oven this weekend and snaping bits off to glue onto the slotabase.  The key is that the top of the sculpey is flat, so the miniature fixes on it without too much hassle, this would also look pretty sweet with snow scatter on it.

I also found an online copy of the CMoN painting guide and am very impressed with some of the content and spotted quite a good quite on painting Logan Grimnar starting on page 268.  Of note the hair is very effective (Teracotta > Teracotta + Vomit Brown > Vomit Brown > Vomit Brown + Firey Orange > Firey Orange > Diluted wash of Blood Red).  Additionally the bone colour looks very smooth (Scorched Brown > Bestial Brown > Vomit Brown > Bleached Bone > Wash of Scorched Brown + Snakebite Leather > Bleached Bone > Skull White).  Although this seems quite long winded as it’s only small areas being done would likely be quite quick to whip through.  Comically it’s a more advanced method of how I used to paint the chest eagles on marines – Bleached Bone washed over with Snakebite Leather.

I’m actually starting to get the bug again and want to get some paint onto a miniature…  True to form the weather has now turned inclement in the UK, so precludes any kind of undercoating with a spray.  However it does mean that I can have a really decent bash at assembling some of my army.

I’m hoping that somebody will go into GW in Swindon on Thursday and pick up the battle force of wolves.  This will mean that I’ve pretty much got all of the troops that I actually want for my army.  I’m tempted to aim to get my skyclaws (5), bloodclaws (15) and scouts (10) assembled up over the weekend.  The scouts require a significant amount of conversion and I aim to fur up at least 3 of the 5 cloaks that the snipers are wearing, so I would think that they’ll not be completely done.  I also treated myself on Sunday to a Runepriest, techmarine with servitors and a Razorback, plus ordered all of the heavy weapons from an online bitz store.  Off the top of my head that means that I should only need one more Razorback and I’ll have all of the models that I need to make my 2000 point army – that makes it sound much easier than the reality.  I want to do a handful of quite major conversions on characters within the army and things like the scouts and Long Fangs warrant more effort than the rest as there are only a few of them and (fluff wise) they’ve been around for quite a long time.  However the whole thing should be pretty straight forward so a target of next year for a complete army is actually possible.

I’ve begun to assemble a pack of Skyclaws now (jump pack marines), and can safely say that the new boxed set integrates with the older plastics without any problems at all – and are infact superior to tidy up as well.  I reckon that 30~35 men and 4~5 tanks will comfortably see me with a 2000 point army – one thing that I do need to do though is to ensure that my actual HQ choices (of which you have double the normal allowed number) are unique and both nicely converted and painted.  I’m aiming to use a Wolf Guard Battle Leader rather than a Wolf Lord, as this would only represent a third of the whole Company.

The topic may have given you a slight indication, but it’s actually my birthday today, sadly I can no longer claim that I’m in my twenties   However due to having quite a cool family I had a number of fantastic pressies.  From a modelling perspective I ended up with a few ‘essentials’ namely glue, undercoat and more snow scatter plus a box of Space Marine Scouts with sniper rifles, another Space Wolf Pack box and a Canis Wolfborn – oh, plus the vouchers for a Space Wolf Battleforce when it comes out this weekend.  More than enough for me to actually get the vast majority of my army done   There are only a couple of things that I will need to buy to get my army to the point I want – namely another box of Wolf Guard in terminator armour and a box of Devastators – however it might be worth just buying the heavy weapons from a Bitz place instead.  Transports I’ll treat as a separate entity.  I think that these pressies are an excellent result   I’m still not conviced about the Canis Wolfborn, but at the end of the day I’ll never look a gift horse in the mouth.  It might be possible to convert the wolf a bit to make it more fitting – watch this space.