Creating My Space Wolf Battle Leader

I wasn’t going to bother entering Golden Demon this year, Voodooworx and real life had been keeping me busy so didn’t have much time to plan or do anything. I got chatting with a friend of mine one evening and afterwards I decided that I should try and enter something or I would just spend the whole day kicking myself.

It was only two weeks until the competition which didn’t leave me a huge amount of time at all. So I decided to focus on a single miniature, there wasn’t really enough time to do anything like a Squad or Regiment.

After looking on the Games Workshop website for some ideas I decided on a Space Marine, deciding what chapter was the easy part for me as I am a die hard Space Wolves fan. I came up with the idea to use the Kor’Sarro miniature leader of White Scars Chapter as a base for the conversion. A lot of the details on Kor’Sarro, like the wolf pelt on the backpack and the trophy teeth on his armour lend themselves really well to a Space Wolf.

I didn’t want to use the head and arms from the Kor’Sarro miniature, so looking through the piles of Space Wolf sprues I have lying around I settled on a bolt pistol arm for his left arm and power axe arm from the Space Wolf boxset for his right.

The axe had two hands on it, but that was easily be removed.

Kor’Sarro’s head wasn’t exactly what I was looking for so I swapped it for one of the plastic heads from the same Space Wolf boxset.

I wasn’t a big fan of his haircut so after some careful cutting with a scalpel it looked like this.

There were a few different ideas for poses, but after a suggestion from a friend of mine (thanks Neil) I settled on pose no. 4. It has lots of movement in the pose and is nice and open so you can see all the miniature details. I also liked pose 2, so one day I may make another version using this pose… maybe.

For the backpack I wanted to keep with fur pelt but swap the backpack itself for the one from the Canis Wolfborn miniature, I’d had it sitting around for a while and thought it would suit the miniature quite well. It was a bit tricky to do as it all came as one piece so I had to cut out the old backpack first, and use some green stuff to conceal the join between the pelt and new backpack.

The next thing to do was to decide on what base I would create for him, bases are always something I don’t think about until the end, but for this guy I wanted to make sure everything worked well together.

I did some really rubbish sketching using Photoshop so that I could get a better idea of what I wanted to do with the base, like I mentioned before I wanted to try the style I’d seen used a few times in the past by David Rodriguez where the angle of the base is carried on up through the base detail.

I bulked out the base using milliput and then placed the dead tyranids where I wanted them before letting it dry. Once dry I took a needle file and sanded down the edges to match the angle of the base. Some details like the tyranids talon I left.

The last thing to do was to add the sand and small details like the bolt pistol casings. I wanted it to look like he really was in the thick of battle to I added quite a few casings.

Now it was time to remove any White Scars iconography and do some greenstuff work.

Here are some shots of the finished conversion before I started the painting.

I knew I wanted to give him some head tattoos, I wanted to give him a ‘Razza style’ Imperial Eagle tattoo on one side and some sort of tribal tattoo on the other.  I did a quick search on google and eventually came across this guy, I have no idea who he is but if by some miracle you know him, tell him thanks.

A bit of rubbish photoshop doodling later to see how it would look on the mini and I was pretty happy.

Then it was onto the painting. It was only a few days before the competition at this point so I apologise for the lack of photos, I just didn’t have a lot of time to take loads of shots after each stage. But here are a couple of shots at about half way through.

Anyway hope this was of some interest. If you have any questions please ask them by using the comment table below and I’ll do my best to answer them. Someone asked for a stage by stage guide for the tattoos, I think that would be a nice tutorial topic, so I will get a one put up on here for that soon.

W.