Happy New Year! Fear the fury of Fenris!

A new year is upon us! This year, I have a few gaming related New Year's resolutions. First, I am going to continue updated my blog. I plan to update at least three times a month. Second, I'm going to commit to finishing my Space Wolves army before the end of the summer. I got a lot of work done on it in the final months of 2010 and I have a lot of work ahead of me. I'll be posting photos of models as they are completed. Finally, I'm going to try to expand my customer base for commission work. Part of that will be though posting photos on this blog and part of it will be spreading the word in the local community. My current commission project is an Ultramarines Techmarine, which should be finished in the next couple of weeks.

So, to start off the year, here's some of what I've done with my Space Wolves army...

I've always been a big fan of dreadnoughts and I wasn't going to miss the chance to convert and paint a few for my Space Wolves. This one has a number of conversions to match the themes of the Space Wolves army. First, I know I wanted to replace the front plate with a Space Wolves shield and change the fist into claws. Neither task took a lot of conversion work and were finished quite quickly. Later, I added a wolftooth necklace to the close combat arm since it seemed a bit bare.









The next round of conversion work on the dreadnought involve alternate weapon options. I added a number of bits from the Space Wolves troops sprue to the missile launcher arm.

For the las cannons, I wanted to do something unique. Using the dragon heads from the Chaos Predator, I began sculpting wolf heads to decorate the gun barrels. Finally, I decided to replace all the skulls across the whole dreadnought with wolf skulls. It was a fairly simple conversion using green stuff. You can see one example on the las cannon arm.




As a center piece model for the army, I spent quite a while working on my Land Raider Crusader/Redeemer. I spent several weeks before I started painting cleaning the pieces, figuring out how to magnetize all the options and doing some pre-assemble. Before finalizing the assembly process, I spent several hours painting the interior. You can see one shot of the instrument panel below. Unfortunately, I made a mistake in the assemble and it is now very difficult to see the detail work that went into it.













I wanted to give the melta gunner a wild, windswept look so I used one of the Blood Claws heads. I figured, the guy who sticks his head out of the battle tank to operate a pintle mounted heavy weapon is probably a bit crazed. As with the dreadnought, I resculpted all the skulls into wolf skull except the ones in the Adeptus Mechanicus symbols.




By the time I finished panting the hull, I felt it looked a bit flat with such wide areas of blue-grey. I decided to add some freehand work to make it more interesting.

Below, I've added a few more shots of the Land Raider for your enjoyment. Next week, I'll post shots of my Grey Hunters, Long Fangs, Scouts, Wolf Guard, and Rune Priest. I'll also follow it up with a list of what I plan to finished painting as part of my New Year's Resolution.