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I seem to be having trouble getting your basic Grey Wolf (that is actually grey - that is to say, is a blend of whitish, grey, black, and dark Browns) painted correctly.

I can get a black Wolf, with appropriate facial colorations and markings.

I can get a reddish Wolf, and even a White Wolf.

But Damned if I can get the freaking grey wolf colored correctly.

I had dug up all manners of reference images.

The models are the Thunderbolt Mountain Wolf Riders.

I suppose that I could just do all of the Wolves "Black?"

After all.... E-Vile Wolves are "black," right?

But I would really like to get at least one proper grey wolf in the pack.

MB

here is the wolf i painted a while back i used heavy drybrushing and washes to get it

I should do a gallery search for some of the newer Wargs from The Hobbit line of minis.

They are stylistically closer to the Thunderbolt Mountain Wolves.

But from the one image so far, I think my problem is more to do with the style of sculpting Tom Meier used on these, and my epic failure at being able to paint reasonable whites at the moment.

For one, I need to STOP FREAKING USING GREY as a shader for whites, and use a brown, blue, or reddish shading for the white (depending upon location.

And...

I NEED TO FREAKING GET SOME NEW WHITE PAINT!!!

The white paint I have is so grainy it looks like sand has been mixed in it, even after diluting it to the consistency of skim milk.

One thing that might help I might be going to buy another bottle of thinner, and mixing about half the bottle of thinner with this bottle of white paint.

I have managed to get One Grey-Wolf that is halfway acceptable.

I am going to re-paint the lighter areas of the wolf again, using a brownish red as the shading color, with a yellowish white as the first highlight, building up to a pure white.

AND.... Mix a F*** ton of retarder/thinner into the red-brown shading, and into the pure white highlights to get the shading to blend better.

Tom's details on these wolves are so freaking harsh that really you need to blend each Damned sculpted hair to get it to look right.

But... I figure out of the nine wolves in the unit (two giant wolves per base, plus one "normal" wolf on one of the bases (They all have riders).

And, I have one white Wolf Finished (that could use a touch-up with some better shading for the whites), one Red Wolf, one Grey Wofl (so far), and the rest of the Giant Wolves will be your basic black "evil" wolf... I will do the "normal" sized wolf as a Grey Wolf. The fur on it is sculpted a little more smoothly.

But . . . . By ALL MEANS Any more suggestions or hints would be greatly appreciated.

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 kencotter wrote:
here is the wolf i painted a while back i used heavy drybrushing and washes to get it

What figures are these?

They would make excellent werewolves for First Age Middle-earth.... And I need some Stuff for 1st Age Middle-earth bad guys other than Orcs/Goblins (Since Morgoth had a slew of Maia based monster technologies, and Sauron seemed to be Morgoth's main Genetic Engineer (Morgoth basically sulked on his Throne through the majority of the 1st Age).

But Werewolves were Sauron's Thing in the 1st Age, much like Undead were his thing in the 3rd Age, prior to the War of the Ring.

MB

Those are the Fenrisian Wolves from 40k (plastic and come in sets of 5).

for my grey i went from a black undercoat then i mixed a grey and blue to get my mid-tone which i dry brushed over the whole thing but a bit more paint on your brush then normal.

before it drys on the model i took a lighter blue and grey mix and used dry brushing again to add a highlight i then chose a darker color than the mid tone and stippled it in the pattern i wanted when fully dry i filled in the area with the dark color

when that was done i washed first with a black then a brown mix to tie it all together. lastly pic out details like teeth, claws etc

 kencotter wrote:
for my grey i went from a black undercoat then i mixed a grey and blue to get my mid-tone which i dry brushed over the whole thing but a bit more paint on your brush then normal.

before it drys on the model i took a lighter blue and grey mix and used dry brushing again to add a highlight i then chose a darker color than the mid tone and stippled it in the pattern i wanted when fully dry i filled in the area with the dark color

when that was done i washed first with a black then a brown mix to tie it all together. lastly pic out details like teeth, claws etc

A "wet-to-dry" brush!

This sort of worked, and it produced the best results so far (with slightly different color mixes).

But I made an accidental discovery along the way, which I am going to be repeating with all my paints.

I accidentally added about 2x the amounts of Thinning Retarder that I normally add.

This made the drybrush nearly impossible until I spent about a minute clearing the brush of any wet streaking color.

Due to the failures I have been having with drybrushing, I was not expecting much.

BUT . . .

To my utter surprise, suddenly my dry-brushing was starting to look a LOT like what I used to be capable of ten to twenty years ago (with different paints - turns out that the paints mixed by Al Pare for Heritage, Genesis, and then Reaper's original formula used a medium that included a retarder, which they no longer use).

So... My highlighting was looking a lot softer and less "stark."

I am going to be going through all my paints and adding about five to ten drops of Thinning Retarder to the bottles, since it does not seem to affect coverage until it gets to the level of dilution I had with the few drops of reddish-grey and white paint that I had.

I knew that I used to use a wet-to-dry brushing technique, but I just have not been able to get the blending to work properly until this accident (that seems to be the way of things with painting).

But the Grey Wolf looks much more like a Grey Wolf. He is still pretty sloppy due to how many times I had to cover some areas, but at least when I go to do the next one I will have a clue as to what the hell to do.

MB

glad to have helped hope they get better as you go

Would you like me to dig out an old White Dwarf tutorial article on painting 4-5 different colours of wolf fur? reds, greys, etc.
I have it in my folder, it uses the model posted above.

It is fantasy, they are your wolves, you can paint them however you want! As long as you are happy nothing else matters.

What makes wolves and dogs so difficult is that their coat is often brindled - that is, the undercoat is a different (and lighter) color than the topcoat. If this isn't taken into account, the critter just doesn't look right.