Wulfen Scouts

Thought I'd lost this post with the Blogger outage, but thankfully its come back at last.  This was supposed to go out at the end of last week, but best laid plans and all that.  Anyway, onto the post:


Wulfen, such awesome models and I was gutted that I'd missed them in my decade hiatus when I first saw them.  I've kept a weather eye on ebay ever since in case some came up for a bargain and a few months ago my prayers were answered and I got these guys for a not too crazy price.  They sat in Dettol for an age while I tried to figure out what to do with them (I've already got Mark of the Wulfen models for all my squads), and it wasn't till only a little while ago that I realised that 5 is exactly the minimum number of scouts in a pack, and that these would work perfectly.

Above you see them post Dettol, cleaned up of mould lines etc. (how people don't clean this from models, especially models as good looking as this still staggers me, a mould like completely destroys the look of a model) and undercoated.  I decided that as this was a small unit, and metal is relatively easier to strip if things go wrong, I'd use them as a first full test of my new painting method for my army.  The painting was done over a few nights and went really well, below I'll go through all the main steps so you can see how the look develops.

All the armour is first painted with Fenris Grey before being given a heavy over-brush of Shadow Grey.

The next step was a relatively heavy down-brush (this is dry-brushing but only in a downwards direction to apply highlighting to the upper surfaces of everything, simulating zenithal lighting without all the difficult blending) with my first highlight mix which you can see on the right in the background.

This was followed by a lighter down-brush of my secondary highlight mix (in the back on the right).

Codex Grey was applied to all the ribbing and pipe-work.  I also decided that the Scouts squad colour (which I use on the shoulder pads) would be Grey so the shoulder pads got painted with Codex Grey as well.  Boltgun Metal was applied as necessary to metal parts/equipment.

Red (in the form of Mechrite Red), my armies main spot colour, was applied to weapon cowlings and a few decorative items across the squad.  All the chest decorations, teeth, claws, runic charms and other bone-like deocrations were based with Dheneb Stone.

I imagine that Space Wolf Scouts would spend a lot of time out of the Fang, even when not deployed, honing their field-craft, and would have become a little feral.  Add to this that in a lot of the fluff they mention the skin of Space Wolves darkening with time as a by-product of their gene-seed flaws and so for the "older" unit types I don't use a flesh colour but a mid-brown.  In this case the flesh was painted with Graveyard Earth.  Leather pouches etc. were based with Snakebite Leather.  The hair/fur was first base-coated with Adeptus Battlegrey, then drybrushed with Codex Grey, and finally selectively drybrushed with a mix of Codex Grey and Bleached Bone to give some variation in the fur.

This squad is the first to also be given my Wolf company marking, the Night Claw.  I've had the fluff for this floating around in my head and developing with my army with time and I hope to add a story post soon.  The guy with the wolf's head shoulder pad and chainsword is going to be my Wolf Scout Mark of the Wulfen squad member so the wolf's head seems appropriate.

Highlighting was applied to all the other areas of the models.  I almost exclusively highlight in one or two stages, adding Bleached Bone to the base colour for each stage.  I prefer this method as it gives a softer, warmer tone to the highlights than using pure white.  Obviously the Dheneb Stone was highlighted with Bleached Bone first, then with Skull White.  The red was highlighted with Blood Red.

Final stage is a thorough wash with a Devlan Mud wash that has been mixed with equal amounts of water and a drop of washing liquid to keep the surface tension down.

And that's everything.  I may go back and do the odd additional highlight, the skin and bone sections all look like they could do with a little extra, but otherwise I think they are looking pretty good, and best of all the process is relatively quick.

Comments and advice on how I can improve these would be really appreciated as I'm always looking to improve things.  Sorry for the overly long post, cheers, Andy