Wolf Priest: WIP

Let me introduce you to Hrafn Fire-in-the-Heart, Wolf Priest to Rikkard's Great Company.

Inspiration is an important thing in this hobby – much like any other art form or creative pursuit. A hobbyist may be inspired by story, or a character, a new kit, a new codex, or all manner of things. In this case, I was inspired by one model, built and painted by one person. Therefore before I go into any more details about my own take on a Wolf Priest, I should place credit where credit is due and link you to William (Wiltrichs) Davies's Wolf Guard Battle Leader.

I'm not going to beat about the bush here – that is one of my all-time favourite minis. It played no small part in pushing me over the edge to committing to built a Space Wolves army.

So, please click on that link and check out William's mini – and his others too as they're all superb.

Right; I'd better start talking about my own model.

This is all built around GW's Kor'sarro Khan model, which I bought when it first came out purely because I thought the pose was awesome and I could one day use it for something. This, it turns out, was that something!

Eugh ... what a horrible photo ... sorry folks!

Khan is quite a good base from which to start a Space Wolf conversion as many of his details are quite wolfy. The cape, most obviously, since it's fur, but he also has a number of little trinkets like the tooth necklace which work very nicely. I just shaved and filed off any that didn't quite fit (i.e. White Scars icons!). I also clipped off the mummified head hanging from Khan's belt and replaced it with a skull trophy.

There was one area I particularly had to address, and that was the 'belt buckle'. Once I got rid of the big White Scars icon, it looked rather bare, and to be honest it looked quite rough. I decided to break out the green stuff and re-sculpt the shape of the buckle as it is a simple shape and just about within my sculpting ability. Obviously, that would not eliminate the bareness of that area so I carefully trimmed and filed down a little wolfy skull bit and pressed it carefully into the still pliable green stuff.

The head is probably worth a mention. Inspired by William Davies's screaming and angry-looking model, I selected the screamiest and angriest-looking head from my bits box, which happened to be from Forge World's Shadow Captain Korvydae. It fit well, as I actually didn't want this model to be a hairy Space Wolf as I wanted him to be something of a contrast to his brothers given his position as Wolf Priest. Although, again borrowing heavily from William's model, I did attempt to sculpt a little mohawk on his head. Hopefully with some paint on it, it'll end up looking ok.

The crozius itself was a simple conversion; I just stuck an appropriate wolfy backpack icon onto a power weapon handle. I'm not sure how he expects the little rune and tooth hanging on it to stay in place once he started smashing skulls, but there you go – who said 40K was meant to make sense?

I had to make sure to get the posing right on this guy, not only because I wanted him to stand out, but to do justice and complement the base mini. I stuck with the left arm holding the bolt pistol forward at full extent (amusingly, I just noticed I chose the exact same bit as in William's model!), but I spent a lot of time thinking about the right arm and how it would hold the crozius.

I dry fit it in the same way William did with his model, but it just didn't work for me on this particular model. Eventually, I settled on the pose I did, trying to make it look like he was preparing to swing the crozius, rather than being in mid-swing. Hopefully I pulled it off.

There's one final thing about this guy – since I wanted him to be able to lead Blood Claws (or Grey Hunters) and also Skyclaws, I needed to magnetize his backback so it could be replaced by a jump pack. Here he is with said jump pack.

The only jump pack I had in my bits box was a Sanguinary Guard one, but it looks kind of nice. It gave me more room to play with the arm positioning too. Again, unadorned it looked rather bare so I sculpted a pelt hanging from it.

It's not that hard to magnetize backpacks (I may do a tutorial on that) but in this case a pewter miniature made it really tricky. That green stuff on the back of the backpack and cloak is actually covering a big hole where my drill accidentally went right through ...

The below image will show the end results.

The red circles show where the recessed magnets are. I needed two magnetic points to hold the weight of the metal backpack. One was plenty for the plastic jump pack.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this WIP. Any comments or questions, drop a comment in the commenty bit and I'll get back to you.