Space Wolf painting... under way

I managed to grab a couple of hours the other evening, so the basic armour colour is in place. GW Astronomicon Grey with a Devlan Mud wash over the top. The target is tabletop quality at a reasonable speed, and since I get about an evening a week to model, this is my method. 

Next will be the pack markings and the details - all those wolf teeth and claws.

What happens when you cross...

...a Basilisk with a Leman Russ?

This is the first of my two artillery pieces; I have combined the hull from the Basilisk with the track units from the Leman Russ. I was looking for something a little different, and with Bits and Kits selling the tracks for £2.50 each, this was fairly cheap. I will find a use for the Basilisk track units somewhere, I'm sure.

Quick and easy, and it looks a bit heavier than the standard Basilisk without being so different as to confuse my opponent.

8068

Starting a new army

I feel in need of a new army. My Imperial Guard have ground to a halt, as I wait for Wargames Factory to put out the heavy weapons, and although I have a couple of Earthshakers under way, I feel like a change. I was browsing the lead-and-plastic mountain and I found a few of the old 13th Company Wulfen dating back to the old Eye of Terror codex, so I have decided to use them as the starting point for a Space Wolves list. I guess most people know the figures I mean, but they are partially equipped with chaos armour torn from the bodies of their victims on the great hunt through the Eye of Terror. I like that idea, but I want to bring it up to 999.M41 rather than being the remnants of a Heresy force.

So, after a quick browse through the codex, I found this...


Bran Redmaw's Company
Bran Redmaw, whose personal icon is the Bloodied Hunter, likes nothing more than to hunt under the full moon. Bran is instinctively cunning, able to second-guess his enemies and ensure that his Grey Hunters lie in wait for the enemy after the fury of his front line forces them to retreat. The savagery of his company is legend - an enemy force trapped by Bran's Great Company will quite literally be torn to pieces.

The sign of the Bloodied Hunter is associated with those with the Mark of the Wulfen, and indeed there are many in Bran's Great Company who bear that particular curse - some even whisper that Bran has been seen to take on a different form when caught up in the hunt.


So here is the basis of my force. Bran believes that the end-time is coming. He believes that the momentary reappearance of the legendary Thirteenth Company during the last Black Crusade presages greater things. And he believes that his wolves must prepare for those days - those wonderful, terrible days - when Russ will walk amongst us again.

With this thought, he has sent out his Great Company to hunt the traitor once again. They are to hunt wherever the trail leads them, to supply themselves from the enemy, and to return to the Fang when the Wolf Time comes, stronger and faster, to stand beside Russ.

 The pack has a powerfist, a banner, two meltaguns, five hunters with basic weapons and, of course, the wulfen. Mostly made from the Space Wolf plastic kit, with odd bits added from the berzerker kit and from the spares box.

The rhino is pretty standard, though I have managed to use the hatch elsewhere so I had to use one of the resin spares I cast up for my Imperial Guard tanks in place of the usual one. Still, that's in keeping with the 'make do and mend' attitude of this army. The icon on the front of the rhino is from the backpack standard in the kit, sanded flat on the back and trimmed to fit the space on the front of the hull.

More to follow. I am intending to get 200+ points per month painted, which should give me a 1500 point army by Easter. Maybe. Watch this space :)

SELWG tomorrow

Sunday is the SELWG show - http://www.selwg.com/selwg05.html - and I have a little cash to spend this time thanks to Ebay. I think I'll be looking for cases from Kaiser Rushforth and some hills and rivers.

It's been a busy few weeks, but hopefully I can get back to doing something with the hobby...

A tale of two pigments

In the end I didn't paint a squad in a mix of paints. Instead, I painted two squads, one in hobby paint and one in craft paints. The comparisons in colour between the pots and tubes were close, but different enough that they would look odd in the same squad.

For the basic coats I used GW Foundation Tausept Ochre and Folkart Yellow Ochre - quite different in level of pigment, and it took two coats of Folkart where I only needed a single coat of GW over black primer. Probably not a fair comparison since that's the whole point of the foundation paints... so let me ignore that one.

The other colours were a fairer comparison. My biggest complaint is the texture of the craft paints. The actual pigment levels were very similar between the two types of paint directly from the pot/tube, but the consistency of the craft paints was rather glutinous. In some of the colours, it was as though the manufacturer had sneezed repeatedly into the mix; the consistency  was almost like white (PVA) glue.

What this meant was that I needed much more thinning to make the hobby paints workable, which obviously reduced the opacity and then led to my needing two coats of most colours to get an even coverage (honourable mention for gray here).

Overall, I have seen enough to prove to myself that hobby paints are better than craft paints for the way that I paint. Craft paints may work for you, and the end results are decent enough, but I will go back to hobby paints from now on.

Oh - and if you're wondering, the upper picture is craft paints and the lower picture is my usual hobby paints...