Revisiting Space Wolves - Infantry Squads

Intercessor Squad Þorberg

In 2020, I took on a full 40k Space Wolves army as a lockdown project, the first time I'd approached a straightforward out-of-the-box project on this scale. I had something around 1500pts before I moved on to a Soulblight Gravelords army in 2021 and I always intended to revisit the Space Wolves. I'm finally doing that! This post will focus on the infantry squads that have received a fresh round of painting attention. Plenty of new pics below the jump...

I assembled and painted several squads of Space Marines over a few short months in 2020 (spurred on by Migs of Iron Sleet's amazing Blood Angels army). I liked the Primaris range, especially that they had a complete army range in GW's excellent "new" kit design style. They were in fact a lot of fun to put together. First time around, I focused on simply getting everything together and complete, with minimal conversion work like head swaps, intending to go back and get into more detail once I had a complete army.

So first up, I've been going back over the infantry squads and applying a year's worth of improved painting skill to touch up the power armour and bare heads.

Intercessor Squad Hervaðr

My original technique for the power armour (documented on Instagram) was designed to be quick, grimy, and to opt for a less stylised style than the Eavy Metal edge-highlighting style. I painted the armour a flat blue-grey, and then let some intense weathering fill in for panel-lining, shading, and dirt all at the same time. I've since been convinced that manual highlighting and shading does help a mini read better, so this time I went back and overpainted some highlights and lowlights, as well as some translucent layers of the original blue-grey in order to knock back the weathering a little bit and unify the armour colour across the whole army.

Assault Intercessor Squad Auðr

I also took the time to add some missing decals - the white Space Wolf logo is only, to my knowledge, available through old school Epic 40k decal sheets. So it's hard to come by, and some models were originally left without it.

I gave some more attention to the faces. I recently started using a wet pallette, which is great for holding onto colours for longer. That came in useful here. I also found a shade of brown I liked better (Vallejo Chocolate Brown, which is just a tad warmer and more saturated than the Burnt Umber I used before), which made all the leather details look crisper. I neatened up the winged skulls on the model's breastplates, and freshened up the purity seals (painting several dozen Deathrattle Skeletons in the meantime helped me to improve at detail painting).

The Eliminator Squad

Same Eliminator Squad, different view

When I first left off with the Eliminator Squad, I was unhappy with their cloaks, which I'd tried to match to the black Icelandic soil of their bases. I gave these more attention and some extra texture, and their cloaks now look pretty good. The Eliminator Sergeant got rebased to balance his pose better. I also touched up the occasional red lenses across all the infantry models.

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So that's all the infantry squads. Next up, the HQ and characters...