Hi everyone. Brett here, coming at you with another hand painted gift. This time a slightly altered Grimpaw model commissioned by my cousin for my uncle. Wolves are my uncles favorite animal.
So lets get started. I scaled him up to approximately 150-160% if I remember correctly, snipped the little spikes off his back and tried to scuff them up to blend in with the fur. They're still a little bit noticeable, but overall, they don't look too bad. For this model I brought in a new brand of paint to help out: Vallejo Xpress Colors, and oh do they deliver! I highly recommend them. They may not have quite as large of a range as The Army Painter Speedpaint 2.0 line, or Citadels Contrast line, but the colors they do have are excellent. I started my paint job by zenithally priming the model and base as I usually do. That's my go to for starting paint jobs ( I'm no pro, its all I've got in my tool box for now). I started with the base as I hadn't come up with a color scheme for Grimpaw yet. With the base having quite a bit of black on it, I dry brushed grey over the large central stone to bring out some of the texture and detail in it. Once it dried, I coated the whole rock on The Army Painters Dark Tone to get into those cracks and crevasses and deepen the shadows, but that also darkened some of my previous drybrush work, so I went over the rock again with a Vallejos Pale Sand color, and then Vallejos Ivory color to try and pop the highlights back out even further. I did the same steps where I could for the other rocks. I used The Xpress colors Lizard Green to cover the forest floor of the base and add some color next, Wasteland Brown was used for the log to add in its base color. The moss on the base is my own mix for moss. It's just flocking and matt medium. It makes a nice dense paste that goes where I want it and dries hard enough to handle and touch up with paint afterward. I threw that around willy nilly on the base, just putting it anywhere I wanted. I think it looks really nice and adds a great texture to the base, and keeps it from being so flat. When it dried, I used some Vallejo Game Color Moss and Lichen to add all the yellow spots to my overly green moss. I like that variation on color. Once the whole base was dry, I went over most of the ground cover with a mix of Citadels Bel-Tan Green or however you spell it, and The army Painters Dark Tone again to darken it back down and try to make it look like forested earth. I don't think I achieved that particular effect, but I got it good enough for my skill level.
Now it was on to Grimpaw himself. This part intimidated me as I've never painted a wolf before, but to be fair, I had never painted a gorilla either until my mothers day project the month prior. I found that silver back gorillas are easy. Black, and grey works just fine, but wolves have a lot of tonal variation to their fur, and it changes depending on the type of wolf as well. I looked through dozens of photos of wolves trying to find a breed that had fur patterns that looked like they were achievable, and I settled on the Grey Wolf. It was an approachable color scheme at least, mostly cream colored on the bottom and blueish grey on the top. I could handle that! So I did. I Started with a coat of Templar White Xpress paint over most of the model. It's really more of a very, very light grey than a white. so it filled in all the recesses in the fur with a light grey, but that wasn't dark enough for me, noooooo I had to go darker, so I broke out one of my absolute favorite colors, the Speedpaint color Runic Grey, which is a bluish grey color and that really started to kick things off. But I only have the 1.0 version of Speedpaint, so I have to be careful of reactivation with it. Some may call it a flaw, I call it a feature. Just not a feature I needed at this moment. Once that was dried, I varnished the wolf in matt varnish to lock everything down before moving on to drybrushing a layer of Pale Sand again over the tips of the fur to highlight it. Now there was the business of how to handle the browner middle section between the paleness of the legs and the blue-grey of his back, I can't quite remember what exact color I used here, but I think it was the Xpress color Copper Brown, whatever it was turned out pretty nicely. I used that on his sides, behind his ears on on his cheeks and on the top of his snout. All that's left is the finishing touches. Black claws, and nose, Citadels Flash Gitz Yellow on the eyes, with a tiny black dot for a pupil, and another light drybrush of Pale Sand over the nose area for a highlight. That's all I can really remember, I really need to start recording my painting sessions for reasons just like this. If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I hope all of you fathers out there had plenty of time to spend in the hobby yourselves for your day.