Following hot on the tails of my Wolf Guard Terminators are these young pups, a pack of Blood Claws. After the jump read about what really winds me up about the plastic Space Wolf Sprue.
Ok ok, so it’s only a small tiny bug bear that winds me up, but the single box kit that that you use to make three different Space Wolf units means your units really start looking the same . Grey Hunters can carry chainswords so can Wolf Guard in power armour so not even weapons can be really used to truly define your units and give them a characterful look.
Below, I’ll share how I helped define each pack to make each unit distinguishable.
Left to right: Blood Claw, Grey Hunter, Wolf Guard, Wolf Guard Battle Leader, Wolf Lord.
Bloodclaw: These guys are the newest recruits. I wanted to represent that in their armour. I used stock space marine chest, legs and backpacks. The only Space Wolf parts are the arms, the shoulder pad with the Company marking (out of shot) and the head. I used all the young heads in the kit (no beards) to show their youth.A couple of Space Wolf ornaments finished these guys off. A subtle touch was using bare chests with just a skull on them. This shows that the armour has yet to have any personal adornments attained from years of fighting.
Grey Hunter: To show the slightly older and wiser nature of the Grey Hunters I’ve put the helmets back on. I’ve also started to use the chests and legs from the Space Wolf kit (although mixed in some standard marine legs into he unit so they’re not totally full on decked out Space Wolves). Stock backpacks for these guys.
Wolf Guard: I saved all the wise old grizzled bare heads for this unit. I used all the special weapons as well for them to mark them out as special. They also get the Space Wolf backpacks and shoulderpads that the Grey Hunters and Blood Claws didn’t get. One final touch was adding the totems to the top of the back packs. It gives them a little more stature and height over their lesser brothers.
Wolf Guard Battle Leader: This model gets Wolf Cape, a Wolf Lords Back Pack (with golden wolf head exhaust vents and a Wolf helmet. No other model in the army will use a Wolf head helmet so this will really help this model stand out.
Wolf Lord (Ranger Blackmane): Full on dramatic cape and a back banner marks him out as more important then the Wolf Guard Battle Leader. He also uses the body of an official Wolf Lord model.
In conclusion, you can see that limiting the parts and mixing with stock marines can help define new recruits whilst slowly increasing the Space Wolf parts can show how elite a model is. Hopefully the paint will further define that with the young Blood Claws with their red hair and the Wolf Guard getting grey or white hair.
What do you think? Worth the effort or should I have just went crazy and adorned every model with as much Space Wolf ‘bling’ as possible?
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One of these days I'll see that Ragnar model painted! 😉
great work, i love the narrative behind the armour choices. Perhaps throw in some Heresy Era Armour at some of your Wolf Guard?
Totally worth the effort, and something I think I kind of did with my recent models as well. Also by painting the BC hair as a brighter orange/blonde, the GH as a darker tone, and the WG+ as grey/white hair with the bearded heads and talismans/tails also helped that definition of unit. Of course the pack markings are what easily identifies them when I sort my figures out using the traditional red/yellow, red/black, black/yellow (and white/black for any Long Fangs you may have)
Good shout on the hair and beard colours.