Stomps! Legs of a Knight

I've made some nice progress on my Imperial Knight! This has been a really fun project so far, and I have tried my hand at several new things.

 

First, I sculpted some fur onto his shoulder pads. I've never done any real sculpting before, and I'm very happy with how they've turned out so far. They're finished but the torso they attach to still has some work to go.

I thought it would be fun to do one brown and one grey. The more I paint brown fur, the more I think I am getting the hang of it. Just took a little longer to figure out than the grey. I might go back and touch up some of my brown wolves now, since they're a little sad.

Happily, I have made some good strides with the rest of him. His legs are entirely finished. I glued down the armor plates and his tabard last night. He went from being in about 16 pieces to being in 7. I went a little crazy with the decals, perhaps. I wanted him to look fancy enough to denote his stature, though.

One of the more fun parts was learning to make my own decals. Most of the decals shown are either from the Knight kit or from those that came with my Space Wolf boxes. But the wolf heads on the red part of his shin guards are ones I printed out myself, using Testors decal paper. I'll definitely talk about that more later, but as you can see, I think they turned out pretty swanky.

His left knee, though, is free handed. Again, another new thing. I've done minimal freehand to this point. I think it turned out ok for my first attempt. It looks good from here, but not so nice upon up close scrutiny.

I am enjoying working on him. Even though he was pretty pricey, I have already gotten more hobby time out of him than a box of Grey Hunters. He's approximately 1/3 complete, so the price per hobby hour is about the same. I am going to field him for the 4th time tomorrow and I'm quite looking forward to it.

Beginings of an Imperial Knight

A couple weeks back, I went to a swap meet at my FLGS to unload some minis I'll never get around to painting. The hope was I'd sell enough stuff to be able to buy and Imperial Knight, and I did just that! He only cost $40 out of pocket. Quite a nice deal, I'd say.

What is that? Can I kill heretics with it?

  I tried to plan out how many pieces I wanted him to be in for painting- turned out to be a lot. He has a lot of parts to him, and I want to make the painting process as easy as possible. I left all his armor plates off, and kept his arms, his legs, and his torso separate. I have blue stuffed him together several times, for test fitting but also for my very first game of 7th!

Stomp, stomp, stomp!

 Despite having no arms, he did very nicely for himself. I think he brings a lot to my Space Wolf army that it really needed. I'm a little disappointed he can't just reach up and swat fliers out of the sky, but you can't have everything :-) .

Trying to position his arms was tricky.

Eventually he did get his arms. I opted for the Knight Errant version. I really, really like that giant melta gun. The points of articulation on him are awesome, it makes customizing his pose a breeze. But it was a little involved trying to get him to look just the way I wanted while trying to hold 6 places still. I got there eventually.

I wanted to make him proper wolfy-looking to theme up with my Wolves. So he got some pelts added. First, I took his hanging tabard, clipped off the fringe at the bottom and added fur to the back of it. Then I started wolfing up his shoulder pads and eventually came up with this:

 It might look familiar- there's a variant Space Wolf shoulder pad that looks just like this. That's what gave me the idea. For my first attempt really sculpting anything from scratch, I am very pleased with how it turned out.

I am going to paint some runes along his armor as well, but as far as conversion work goes, that's about the end of it. I didn't want to over power him with all kinds of crazy stuff. But I did dig through my bits box and come up with a few choice pieces to add to him for a little more character.

Originally, I was thinking of painting him mostly white with bronze accents, but I am wavering on that now. It was going to be difficult to paint and I was looking forward to the challenge, but now I'm not convinced that it will really look all that good on the table.

I've envisioned him as a Freeblade, so I've really run a little wild with his history. He's aligned himself with the Wolves, so his heraldry would reflect that. I'm thinking of calling him The Boot of Russ.

I am thinking of a heraldry consisting of a dexter wolf head and a sinister Imperial Eagle. I was going to have the wolf black with red background and the Eagle black with a yellow background. Red and yellow are the accent colors on my Wolves, so he'd tie in with them. Not sure on any of the colors now, as I am rethinking his whole scheme.