Continued from Part I and Part II...

Sick of wolves yet?
I hope not! We’ve come to the final part in this article series (at least for now! :D) where, as promised, I will give you my tips on how I paint wolves, as well as lots of photos to help demonstrate it, and finally, you’ll get to see a bunch more of these wolf models fully painted as a handy reference too.

Now first up, I’m not exactly an ‘expert’ painter at all, and most of my techniques are fairly basic I think. I only ever aim for a “good tabletop standard” really, as I don’t really have the time to dedicate to ‘showpiece’ type of miniatures, especially these days when I find more joy in getting a big unit ‘ready for the table’ than anything else anyway. That said, I am pretty happy with how my wolves turn out usually, and as I see a lot of very non-wolf-like paintjobs on wolves – if you are going for a “kinda realistic” ideal like I am, this could still be useful hopefully!

In Part I I discussed how much Prep these various models take, but there’s one more step when it comes to painting – undercoating. I spray all my wolf models white, well, it’s actually an off-white as that’s what I have right now.

The next step is also fairly uninteresting – I base coat all the wolves next. For a “normal” wolf fur colour that I will be demonstrating in this post, I would use white. But I sometimes use a light grey or cream or even other shades if I am wanting to do some different coloured fur. The important thing for this technique is to base coat it a light colour – aim for base coating with the “highlight” shade you want basically. For these examples as I say, that’s white – and of course you can’t get any lighter than white as a highlight! Slap it on, thin down the paint slightly if you need to – this is only a base coat and it’s going to get painted over a lot later anyway so it doesn’t matter if you don’t apply this perfectly:

Now it’s time for the first wash. In case you don’t know what I mean, this is a thin watery layer of paint that will fill into recesses on a miniature. Some people use inks (or the new GW Contrast paints? CG: Contrast paints would have to be thinned down for that usually, they’re pretty heavily pigmented, would probably colour the higher parts too much as well…) for this, however I usually prefer in many cases to actually water down regular acrylic paint myself. There’s a bunch of reasons for this – I can get a much wider range of colours than I have in inks & I find it easier to mix paints too (mix before thinning), I feel like I have more control over the consistency of the paint I want, and also many inks tend to leave a slightly glossy finish which I do not want for wolves specifically. I’ve also had years of experience working like this, since when I started to paint miniatures, inks were a very “new” thing! The Citadel Miniatures ‘Expert Paint Set’ with inks had just come out in fact, heh, and I didn’t own it for a while.

You should use whatever washing technique you feel looks the best of course. Another alternative these days is mixing with ‘acrylic medium’ which will dilute the colour of the paint less than water, keeping more of the colour’s depth. I’m pretty new to using it though so I cannot give any great advice on using medium as I’m still experimenting with this myself, and I sometimes use a combination of medium and water to make washes too. If you are mixing a wash with water though, you will usually want it to be at least 50% water, and I usually go higher than that, adding roughly the same amount of water as I have paint to the palette and then add a bit more. Another thing I like about this is that even if you’re not perfectly consistent in how thin the wash is, or how it’s applied, a bit of ‘natural variation’ like that will generally look good on wolves too in my opinion.

However you do it, this first wash should be the lightest shade you want on the wolf, and you should apply it all over the fur. For “normal” wolf fur I generally go for a light brown, a light grey, or a mix in between. Yellowy light browns will work very well too, even if it can look a bit weird at this stage. In fact, as I was painting for this post, my partner saw my paint desk and asked me “why have you painted one of your wolves yellow?!” and I had to assure them that it would not remain as yellow as it looked right now when it was finished! 😀

• 

• 

• 

Next is an optional “intermediate” shade of wash. I’ve done a lot of wolf models that look perfectly good for my standards without this step, but you can do some very interesting effects and make them look even better with it. You can go for a darker shade of your initial “light shade” or what will look very realistic often is to use a brown wash. I always look at photographs of real wolves to inspire me and give me ideas of what colours I want to use. Going from a light-grey shade to a brown will look a bit odd at first, but it is pretty close to how real wolf fur can go. What’s important here though is that you do NOT want to apply this wash all over the model, you only want to put it in areas where you want the fur tone to change and get darker. Again, I look at photographs of real wolves from the internet to figure out where I want to put this intermediate wash. Here’s some examples of how I do this:

• 

• 

• 

The next two steps are actually interchangeable and repeatable! One is doing a final darkest wash, and the other is doing a drybrush highlight. These can work in any order though depending on the finish you’re going for, and repeating these steps is also very easy. If that sounds confusing, hopefully it will make more sense as I demonstrate what I mean.

In all these example I applied the darkest wash first to all the models. I almost always use a black wash for this for the majority of wolf fur looks. I’ve used a thinned down black acrylic paint, but if you have a black ink you like the look of, you could use that too – but be careful of ending up with a glossy or ‘too black’ finish. Once again you want to only apply this to certain areas of the wolf model. Generally the very tops of their backs, their upper legs and head, but sometimes you may want to wash in ‘lines’ of this shade going down their legs or noses etc. Again, I always look at wolf photos for inspiration. There’s a lot of variety you can add to even very similar wolf models by varying hugely their colours and where you place the intermediate and darkest washes – you can really make them look different. You might find this black wash is making too much of a hard “edge” against the other areas of the fur. If this is the case and the wash is still wet you can dapple the areas you don’t like the look of with either a brush with just water on it, or you can mix a part of the wash with more water to make an even thinner wash to help ‘blend’ the edges. If the paint is already dry though or you’re not sure – don’t worry at all, the highlighting step next can be used to help a lot with that.

• 

• 

Sometimes when I’m applying this darkest wash especially I will also “go with the model” and follow the lines of fur on the model to some extent. I’ve usually got an eye on real wolf photos too of course, and this is where having a realistic looking miniature will really help! But even if it’s not a very realistic model, you will sometimes just want to follow the lines on the model anyway.

I also apply this black wash to their mouths, eyes, noses and claws, since I might as well while I have the wash mixed anyway. This will get ‘messed up’ a bit by the highlight next, but it will still help you to see these areas more clearly when painting in the details later.

Sometimes if I want an area to be even darker, or I just want to make the whole wolf fur a bit darker, I will apply a similar wash twice to some areas of the wolf, or just let the wash ‘dry out’ a little and become thicker before I paint some parts. I will also sometimes deliberately mix a thicker wash with less water added to the black – again, I find all this the easiest when working with just paint and water rather than inks.

Onto the highlighting! For this I generally drybrush white paint back onto the wolves. Notably I go from ‘the bottom up’ as it were, as the undersides of wolves are generally the lightest and whitest. I vary my drybrushing technique quite a bit depending on how I want it. How wet the paint is, how loaded your brush is with paint, and the speed and angle you move the brush can all affect how the final look will be. I can’t really explain all the things you can do in writing well – but I just wanted to note that getting drybrushing to look just how you want it can be quite an art-form in itself and you shouldn’t look down on it as a technique!

• 

• 

I will sometimes almost “paint in” (or very thickly drybrush) areas I know I want to be especially highlighted too, for instance their ear tips or eyebrows. On some models with larger fur chunks like the GW Fenrisian wolves, you could also try painting in fur ‘strands’ rather than just drybrushing them, although I’ve not attempted that myself – it will take MUCH longer to do that.

• 

• 

• 

• 

Now is when I will sometimes repeat the darkest wash (and maybe even areas of the intermediate wash) if I’ve found I’ve drybrushed areas and they have become too light for how I wanted, particularly on the top of the wolf. I’ve sometimes painted the whole model reversing the last two steps too, and this also looks good, although you have to be more careful not to create any too hard ‘lines’ in the fur with the dark wash. Again, I will sometimes repeat and reverse these wash-highlight or highlight-wash steps on areas of the wolves’ fur until I am happy with the result and how it all blends together.

Finally I paint in the details. I use a dark red for their tongues, a skin-tone light pink for their teeth, yellow for their eyes and pure black for their noses – although I also like a very thick black wash to leave some of the drybrush highlight showing on some of their noses. I will usually dark wash those areas again and then apply the base coat again to create a bit of shading/highlighting on the details, but these areas are often so small I don’t go crazy with this – although on some character models I will go for more highlight tones and sometimes also ‘black dot’ the wolves’ eyes.

And so, the final results! The idea is to have created a multi-tonal ‘realistic’ looking fur that’s light & dark in the correct places, but still ends up with some shading and highlighting, but using only pretty simple techniques of washing and drybrushing. I am pretty happy with the result for all of these models and I find wolves extremely satisfying and even quite quick to paint like this. I did the majority of painting these in only a couple of evenings, and there is no way I can normally finish models at such a pace when having to do ‘proper’ highlighting or picking out lots of details and other things.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

And finally, here’s an example of many of the wolf models I reviewed together:

As always, please follow me on flickr if you want to see all of my miniature photography. I also sometimes post updates on the Kings of War forum and The 9th Age forum, I’m Remy77077 in both those places too of course. 🙂

CG: I might comment in the comments, but where’d be the fun in that – can’t even add pictures there. Thank you Remy for that article. When I first saw your wolves I thought it might be much harder to replicate than it actually seems to be. The steps are simple but based on some observations that didn’t consider before: drybrushing with white from below and using a darker wash on top. Especially that step will be pretty handy to spice up my contrasted wolves, which at the moment just consist of a single coat of Gore Grunta Fur… I’m not much of a painter. I might also finish my horde of wolves I started years ago:

• 

• 

Some of the wrong assumptions I went with when painting these were that dogs had dark skin. I think that only applies to polar bears in the animal kingdom and don’t really know where I got that. Maybe because my neighbours dogs lips were pretty dark. I also painted the legs darker because of that wrong idea… I don’t know what got into me.

• 

While definitely not nearly as refined and nice as Remy’s, just taking a black wash (Dark Tone from Army Painter) over the top and then dry brushing with an off-white from below (in this case Bone White from Army Painter) did a lot to break up the monotony of the fur while still being done in almost no time. It may be a bit too subtle, but after reading the article above I needed to immediately try my hand at it myself.