Lone Wolf Winter

Recently I was sorting through a box of old models given to me by a friend when I stumbled upon this old Space Marine. I might have just passed over him but something about his hairdo and aggressive pose made me think of the Space Wolves, which in turn made me think of fellow blogger Alex of Leadballoony, who’s been working on some of these grey-armoured space barbarians recently as part of his Wolf Time project. Over the last several months Alex has been lovingly, and with outstanding attention to detail, crafting a horde of Orks and Space Wolves in order to recreate the Wolf Time campaign from the Rogue Trader era of 40k – a project that’s well worth taking a look at and being inspired by!

Anyway, given my aversion to the Space Wolves (something I could go into the whys and wherefores of but which I think I’ll save for whenever I get around to my long planned Space Wolf kill team), and my close and long-standing affiliation with the Orks, you would have assumed that this would inspire me to paint something green – all very logical but you’d be dead wrong in this case. Instead, in the kind of headlong, spur-of-the-moment charge often associated with the Sons of Leman Russ, I found myself painting my first ever Space Wolf. Plus, it gave me the chance to use some of the vast drifts of modelling snow I was given by another friend who was having a clear out and, given my tendency to base my models in a grubby, Underhive and distinctly precipitation free style, hasn’t really done very much apart from sit on the shelf making me look like I might be a cocaine dealer.

I went for a darker grey scheme than is usually associated with post-Heresy Space Wolves, partly because I think that suits a scout better and partly because I feel the baby-blue scheme is just a tiny bit naff. Throughout painting him I kept thinking that I recognised the colour choices I was making, and sure enough it’s exactly the same as the scheme I used for my first Van Saar (another project I must get around to working on again soon…).

Surprisingly, given that work remains flat out at the moment, I found the time to work on a couple of other models over the weekend as well so, all being well, I should be able to finish them off, get them photographed and string together some words about them over the next few days.