28mm Reaper & Acheson Creations Wolf Pack

This is a combined, 8 member, wolf pack from Reaper and Acheson Creations' Primeaval Designs range.

These were a significant stumbling block and I sat on them for quite a bit because I wanted to get the fur right. People ask me how long does it take to paint them? Well probably three years from start to finish. I, for now, have the luxury of time.

I'll do separate wolves for Gothic Horror/Fantasy (goblin riders, etc). But these are for the 1812 Retreat game I'm building. As such, I want them more natural and realistic than the usual black fur/red eyes motif more suitable for those games.

Here are the confirmed Reaper Wolf Pack. Tufts by Silflor. Per usual, I used Liquitex light modeling paste to build up the sides to the base on the figure sloping it down to the edges. These area all based on fender washers. Snow technique is simply a 50/50 blend of white glue (to give it volume) and white craft paint.

The fur of real animals does not always lend itself to a traditional dark to light build up - at times it's in reverse - the tops and backs are dark and the underside is light. Plus there's so much going on in the color patterns and what parts have brown, where do the white patterns begin and end, etc.

So the faces I painted normally - that's what everyone looks at first and so I wanted that to look right. Then I put in bands of colors - a light gray/white for the legs and under carriage. Then a band of tan that blends up into a band of medium gray followed by a band of black along the center tops. Each band had a base color and a highlight. At the highlight phase I allowed those strokes to pollute the band above it. At the very end, I dry-brushed Off White over the entire model to harmonize it all. No washes at all on these.

All paints were Vallejo.

Here's the other pack. I've been so spotty about keeping track of what figures are from what. I probably saved the identifying packaging somewhere but who knows?

The sculpting on these is noticeably more coarse than the Reapers are but I think with the paint that  I obscured that fairly well, and that they blend in together mostly imperceptibly.

This one seems like more coyote than wolf.

My Googling shows less red in the mouth area than I was tempted to do. Good. The teeth sculpting was far more impressionistic than accurate. Careful painting hid that.

Unlike human eyes, wolves don't have a lot of sclera showing. After all the work, I chickened out on putting in the pupils. that's not like me at all and I may put them in later but I'll live with the extra menace the "glow" provides.

I have plenty of Russian figures done but this Vivandiere is the only French one. It's important to me to make all of the French uniform in style and color so I want to paint them all up in one go - almost 200 figures. I've never done anything in numbers greater than 30 so I've been apprehensive about tackling it but I'm running out of distracting miscellanea and will have to address them soon.

Thanks all for looking - questions, comments, followers are welcome and encouraged!