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I've been testing schemes for painting my Space Wolves and I've decided that I'm going to make them grey, rather then the blue-ish colour they are in the codex. However I'm a bit stumped as to how to paint grey well, other then basecoat Codex Grey and then highlight with 1:1 mix of Codex Grey and either Skull White or Space Wolf Grey.

Does anyone out there have a good tutorial for painting grey Space Wolves? Any help would be much appreciated.

black undercoat, codex grey, devlan mud wash dry brush fortress grey, highlight with 2:1 codex grey to skull white then a 1:1 of the last mix then a final highlight of skull white. Or the other way i do it is black base coat white leaving the edges light grey leaving the edges darkest grey hope it helps my wolves are done using the latter method

I would go for

- Black undercoat
- Codex grey base coat
- Fortress grey/Codex grey highlight (or maybe just Fortress grey
- Devlan mud wash to blend the greys and highlights better, and shade recesses
- Go over highlights again with Fortress grey

That's how Im gonna go about it when I get around to painting my grey Space Wolves. But Im considering maybe an Asurmen Blue wash, or mixing the Codex grey base coat with Shadow grey to get a SLIGHT blue'ish tint, cause Im scared just plain-grey will be too boring.

I havnt tested my gray primer yet ( but assuming it works perfectly ) this is what i would do .

Gray primer
black wash the crevices
clean up the over flow / defused areas
high light

Thanks for all the advice guys. I like Ronin's suggestion and I think I'll probably go with that. However I might swap the Devlan Mud wash for the black wash Luna suggested. Will have to get some test models done and see what looks good, but in my head a black wash would seem to go better with grey armour.

Ronin wrote:I would go for

- Black undercoat
- Codex grey base coat
- Fortress grey/Codex grey highlight (or maybe just Fortress grey
- Devlan mud wash to blend the greys and highlights better, and shade recesses
- Go over highlights again with Fortress grey

That's how Im gonna go about it when I get around to painting my grey Space Wolves. But Im considering maybe an Asurmen Blue wash, or mixing the Codex grey base coat with Shadow grey to get a SLIGHT blue'ish tint, cause Im scared just plain-grey will be too boring.

I gotta say a big thanks to you Ronin. I finally got round to painting my first grey Space Wolf last night and your method works a treat. I've never used Devlan mud before, but it looks awsome on the grey armour. It gives lovely shading and where the armour is flat it has given it a well worn look, as if the armour is dirty and worn form years of battle, but not so dirty that it looks like the marine never cleans his armour. All I need to do now is go over the highlights as you advised and it's done.
Thanks again for the advice .

P.S. to Luna, I tried the black wash, but it didn't look right. More so due to my lower level of skill as a painter I think, but with the recesses and shading being black, it made the model look like an illustrated figure. It was almost as if the model was cel-shaded which, while cool in it's own right, wasn't the look I was going for. But I've seen your minis and they are awsome, so I'd be curious to see your versions of grey Space Wolves as you'd do a far better job then me.

Wannabe Writer wrote:I gotta say a big thanks to you Ronin. I finally got round to painting my first grey Space Wolf last night and your method works a treat. I've never used Devlan mud before, but it looks awsome on the grey armour. It gives lovely shading and where the armour is flat it has given it a well worn look, as if the armour is dirty and worn form years of battle, but not so dirty that it looks like the marine never cleans his armour. All I need to do now is go over the highlights as you advised and it's done.
Thanks again for the advice .

Im glad the method works a treat. But I cant take the credit. Someone else on Dakka Dakka made the same suggestion, but I cant remember the posters name unfortunately (sorry :() but at the time I agreed with the method, because I believed that a) a Badab black wash would just make the grey model too dark already, b) Devlan Mud would add some warmth and colour to the scheme, and c) You can NEVER go wrong with Devlan Mud
That being said, if the process has been so successful with you, Im glad the process I suggested worked out, so thank you for being my 'guinea pig', so to speak lol

We'd love to see some photos of your minis however.

Used a method close to what you suggested Ronin,

Black Primer
Codex Grey
Devlan Mud
Fortress Grey Drybrush
Space Wolf Grey Drybrush

Ronin wrote:We'd love to see some photos of your minis however.

I don't have a decent digital camera at the moment and my phone camera can't take decent pics of minis, they come out too blurry. However, I am going down to driverbob25's house next week for a big gaming holiday and he has a good camera so I'll post some pics next weekend. The model is Canis and at the moment he's the only Space Wolf model I have.
I'm just debating on wether or not to dry brush the armour codex grey over the wash or not . At the moment all I've done is basecoat Codex Grey, highlight with Fortress Grey, wash of Devlan Mud and re-highlight with Fortress Grey. This has left the model with that 'gritty' feel I mentioned in my earlier post. Will maybe test it tonight on as I can easily correct it if it goes wrong.

If you wanted a gritty feel involving drybrushing, I'd suggest doing the process I mentioned earlier, it'd be changed slightly to

- Black primer undercoat
- Codex grey basecoat
- Fortress grey drybrush (not too heavily but you want something there)
- Devlan Mud wash
- Lightly drybrush again with fortress grey.

It's pretty much the step this guy takes towards painting his Space Wolves (though I think he does Badab Black wash, not sure). Its a very simple, and very quick process, but looking at his pics, it comes out very well.

EDIT: Alright, just had a look through his blog again, his steps were;

Space Wolves Blog guy wrote:"Of course, for my Space Wolves, I plan to have Adeptus Battle Grey as the basecoat, followed by a Badab Black Wash and highlighted with drybrushed (very dry) Fortress Grey."

Dunno if he actually ended up deviating from his plan, but it still looks good.

I'm doing a preheresy Space Wolves army, and found that black undercoat, codex grey and badab black wash gets a dark grey look quickly and easily:



I want a dark armor look, though if you were to lightly drybrush some codex or fortress grey you could lighten it up pretty quickly.

Here's a method:

Prime in black. Start out with Codex Grey and when you highlight, mix in various amounts of Bone White (mix in a little more with each layer, and do as many layers as you feel comfortable with- one layer up is the simple hard edge highlighting method, five layers will make a strong smooth blend between the highlight and base layers).

Using Bone rather than Skull White or Fortress Grey will make the grey warm, and will help the colors blend together (the skull white is a little too stark for great blending).

Well it took a while, but I can finally post pics of my first Space Wolf with the paint scheme recommended by Ronin. Thanks to driverbob25 for lending me his camera.

That looks really good !! I've been thinking of painting grey like the codex cover, too.

I like the wolf better being a little darker than GW has shown, too.

Have any standard troops to show or was Canis your first "test" model ?

In exchange for the Codex Grey basecoat you could use the Adeptus Battlegrey foundation paint. That's what I'm using for mine, highlighting with Codex Grey. It always makes me chuckle that the best paints for SWs are named after the parts of the Imperium that the SWs have little respect for.

Myrthe wrote:That looks really good !! I've been thinking of painting grey like the codex cover, too.

I like the wolf better being a little darker than GW has shown, too.

Have any standard troops to show or was Canis your first "test" model ?

Cheers dude, I gotta be honest and say that I think this is my best painted model to date so I'm quite proud of it.

Don't have any standard troops yet, so Canis has been my test model as well as the main centre piece of my army. I've got Logan Gimnar to paint next and Ulric the Slayer shoud be coming via mail order very soon. Will be a while until their finished though.