Painting Space Wolf Grey Hunters

About the only painting I'll ever be able to do

This post is a bit of a change for the previous ones as it actually has nothing to do with computers which is actually quite an achievement for me. I've been buying Games Workshop crap products for what must be at least 20 years now, starting with the original Space Hulk and 40K Rogue Trader, up to 3rd Edition 40K (bit of a break for uni and not having money or space) and on to 5th Edition and beyond. I have a large portion of both mine and my parent's attics filled with the stuff and I still love it. The 40K lore, the miniatures, the hobby, the game - it's awesome. I am, to all intents and purposes, Games Workshop's bitch.

Though I've always liked painting I've never managed to really get the hang of it. But last year GW released a new set of paints and had proper 'For Dummies' style guides that even I could follow and so after buying more plastic crack that I didn't need, I set about trying to actually complete some models to a high standard. Here are the first off to be completed. What we have here is a squad of Grey Hunter Space Wolves:

Essentially, all I did for each was start with spraying everything with The Fang on top of a Chaos Black (or whatever they call it now) undercoat. Then I applied the base colours, followed by a wash, a layer colour or two and a final highlight to the edges of armour or pads. The specific colours used were:

• Power Armour - Russ Grey (base), Agrax Earthshade (wash), Russ Grey (Layer), Fenrisian Grey (highlight 1), Rhinox Hide (highlight 2 - armour chips)
• Furs - Steel Legion Drab (base), Seraphim Sepia (wash), Agrax Earthshade (wash), Mournfang Brown (Layer), Tallarn Sand (layer), Ushabti Bone (highlight)
• Shoulder Pads - Mephiston Red (base), Agrax Earthshade (wash), Mephiston Red (Layer), Wild Rider Red (highlight)
• Gold Areas - Balthasar Gold (base), Gehenna's Gold (layer), Agrax Earthshade (wash), Gehenna's Gold (highlight)
• Metal - Leadbelcher (base), Nuln Oil (wash), Ironbreaker (highlight)
• Bone - Zandri Dust (base), Agrax Earthshade (wash), Ushabti Bone (layer), Screaming Skull (highlight)
• Black Areas - Abaddon Black (base), Skavenblight Dinge (highlight 1), Dawnstone (highlight 2), Administratum Grey (highlight 3)
• Power Sword - Stegadon Scale Green (base), Sotek Green (highlight 1), Temple Guard Blue (highlight 2), Guilliman Blue (wash), Fenrisian Grey (highlight 3)
• Base - Armageddon Dust (base), Agrax Earthshade (wash), Tyrant Skull (highlight)

This is basically taken wholesale from White Dwarf 388 (because I have no imagination). Some of the things I learnt while painting these marines include:

• Power armour is quite easy to paint - base coat, wash and then highlight at the edges. Job done.
• Fur is significantly more tricky. When I next have to do this, I'll avoid Mournfang Brown and just highlight up after washing the base coat of Steel Legion Drab. More practise needed here.
• Little chips in the armour make a big difference and are easy to do.
• The new texture paints, though awesome, can get *everywhere* if you're not careful with the brush. And they are a pain to remove if you get them where they shouldn't be.
• A sodding HATE doing transfers on power armour. I'm guessing I'm missing something, but as far as I can tell, you can't easily put a flat transfer on a convex surface as, thanks to geometry and what not, it can't go flat - much like lining paper in a cake tin. I consequently had to put cuts in the transfers which (because they were really quite flimsy) made it a bugger not to rip in half. Add to that me forgetting about them, handling the miniature and consequently getting the meticulously aligned transfer stuck to my hand made this really rather an annoying procedure. I'll need to look up how best to do this in the future....

Hopefully this will help the next time I want to paint some Space Wolves. Next: on to some Necrons!

The full gallery can be found on my 500px page here. Enjoy :)