Thursday 28 October 2010

The Wolves At The Door...

I write this with the heady smell of polystyrene cement still lingering in the air, mixed with the accrid tinge of Chaos Black spray.  Safe to say, my head hurts!

It has been well worth it though, as the last couple of days of hard work, cutting and filing, gluing and spraying, means that I now have about 1500pts of Space Wolves ready to be painted - not forgetting the 350pts already under my belt.

All that remains before the fine brushwork can begin is a liberal blast from the Citadel Spray Gun - which in the space of five minutes should finish eighty percent of the basecoats!  Hurrah!

Mind you, it's after that that the hard work will begin.  I only have a few weeks to get these lupine maniacs up to scratch -  well, to gaming standard - so I'll be burning the brush at both ends come the weekend...

But anyway, I'm going to remain optimistic - because the goal is easily achievable, with a bit of discipline, that is!

Anyway, here are some pictures of The Great Howling before the Chaos Black spray went on:




As you can see, I'm going to complete the spray coats on the Drop Pod before removing it from the sprue - and then I'm going to paint it is stages as I assemble it.  This may take a little longer than is available, so I'm going to leave this one until last.  It's a big model that only makes up 35pts of my army, so fun though it may be, I can certainly do without it...



Here are my Wolf Guard Terminators!  (Thanks again for these, WiredWrong).  You'll notice a couple of hastily-bashed Combi-Flamers in the pack.  I did want to make all of the Storm Bolters into Combi's (Sven Bloodhowl's Great Company love their flame weapons, apparently), but there is a distinct lack of flame weapons in the Space Wolves boxes.  I managed to cobble together two Combi-Flamers by hacking up the Heavy Flamer that comes with the Terminators.

The best thing about this unit is that you can split it up and have each of them accompany one of your other Wolf Packs (except for Scouts), so each of my five-man packs of Blood Claws and Grey Hunters will have a tooled-up Terminator leading them.  Because or the army's lack of heavy weapons at the moment, those four Chainfists (2D6+Strength Armour Penetration) will really help to open up any tanks I come across.  Hopefully.  As with the Combi-weapons, two of the Chainfists have been converted using spare Chainswords.


These guys are the hardest-hitting pack in my army.  Wolf Guard with twin Wolf Claws and Jump Packs.  They are a staggering 70-odd points per model, so hopefully they'll live up to the cost.  Their Wolf Claws, skills and Attacks mean that they should get four Attacks in the first round of combat, being able to re-roll either their To Hit or To Wound rolls.  Oh, and they're Rending weapons as well.


The main bulk of the Howling is made of three five-man Grey Hunters packs and two five-man Blood Claws packs.  The Grey Hunters should have all had a Plasma Gun, Wolf Standard and one member armed with a Plasma Pistol and Power Weapon / Power Fist...


...Like the chaps above.


However, as in the example above, I somehow got carried away gluing on Boltguns and completely forgot the Plasma for one of my packs.  Still, I'll probably be grateful for that when the other two Plasma Guns get hot and melt their carriers!  The only thing I'm not overly happy about is that the three Wolf Standards for the Grey Hunters are identical.  It would have been nice to have them all different, but time just doesn't allow it.  I may be tempted to chop a couple of them off after November and convert new ones for them...



And finally, the Wolf Scouts.  I decided to go for a Heavy Bolter and Bolt Guns, again because the army lacks a great deal of punch with regards to firepower.  I was tempted to add lots of icons and pelts and other wolf-y stuff to them, but in the end decided that they're meant to be a stealth unit and nothing gives you away quicker than the approaching sound of your wolf-tooth necklace rattling away...

And that's it, apart from the Blood Claws, which I've already shown, Njal and Lukas the Trickster (who may or may not be painted for this challenge... we'll see what time we get...).

If you're wondering where they are at the moment, they're frantically ringing round to see how many six-seater minicabs they'll need to get everyone back to the Fang.  Njal says they're having trouble finding ones that'll accomodate their mead, spiced meats and severed Ork heads...


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