The Hounds of the Dead

For the dire wolf unit I wanted some thing very dark, the imagery of the hound of the Baskervilles had always stuck with me from reading the books and seeing the art work when I was a lot younger this combined with a childhood memory of watching a film "Wolves of Willoughby Chase" where a pack of wolves terrorises a stately home in a snowy landscape attacking stage coaches and hunting the families children, made me want some thing very dark and haunting.

I didn't think that the vampire counts dire wolf models would get this feeling across so went with some thing a bit different. I had been wanting to do something with the Fenrisian wolves from the space wolf army and had seen them used by a couple of people online to do the same. I didn't want to muck about with them too much as wanted them as just giant wolves rather than rotting corpses.

Getting the unit to rank up was a bit of a faff but after a little bit of playing about with them and numbering the bases so I wouldn't forget it they were ready to be based. From what I had learnt with the base of the necromancer i would have to spray the grass tufts before painting so these where stuck to the bases before I undercoated the unit, this felt really odd to do but paid off .

As you can see in the picture above I have done a little green stuff work, this was mostly to fill in a few gaps but also wanted to make the Doom wolf stand out from the unit a bit so 2 of its legs have been replaced with some bones.

The unit as a whole looks quite simple as a whole but there is quite a bit more work done than first look, the fur has been done with 5 stages of dry brushing then a glaze of "Abaddon black" with "Lahmian medium" to bring it all back together. The faces of the wolves where highlighted up to "Administratum Grey" and brought back down with the same glaze as the fur. I wanted their mouths to stand out  much like the image about so made the insides of them a lot lighter, I still cant decide if I want to gloss varnish them yet to get the drooling look.

For the eyes I kept them really simple just bright white like the necromancer's this gives that ghostly haunting look that I think really suits this sort of painting and I am going to carry it on through the rest of the army.

The next unit i am going to be working on is going to be a mass of skeletons!