Mournwolf Progress

I confess I am feeling the pressure at the moment, knowing that Empire in Flames is only 5 days away.  I am fast running out of time to get my EiF army ready. At this point I think I will be able to put something painted on the table for every unit, but I'm not convinced I'll have time to finish that paintjob. Time will tell, I guess.

With the notable exception of Saturday night when I was lazy and did my usual thing of playing Halo with friends, I have been spending most of my available time trying to make progress on the Mournwolves. I have decided to call them this because "Mournfang Wolves" doesn't feel like a final title. I didn't post an update on Friday because the sum total of my progress on the Thursday night was assembling and then butchering the remaining 2 Mournfangs. At this point they looked like this:

He giveth and he taketh away: I glued together these guys and then promptly started hacking at them as I had the first guy. One lost his lumpy forehead so brutally that there was now only a hole...

The other thing I did was make moulds using Instant Mold of the tail and one of the paws of the prototype Mournwolf. This would hopefully speed up the production of the remaining wolves a little.

On Friday night I only found about an hour to work on them, because we were late home after a football match that went to extra time. But that was OK. I had a plan. I would spend the whole of Saturday afternoon at the club doing more work on the models. Of course, this meant enduring the ridicule of many people who finally realised exactly how much work I had to do (and how foolish I had been to commit to such a plan). I stoically ignored all this (well really, I largely agreed with it), and set to work. At the end of the afternoon, things looked like this:

They're all starting to look more like wolves at this point. Although only 1 of them (the original prototype) has any ears, and those are still to be removed.

I started work on an armoured rider at the club. After how slow my progress was on him, I decided I would have to clone this torso and legs if I wanted to have any chance of getting things done.

The moulded tails each have a thick bit of wire running through them to give them strength and help attach them to the body. On this one the wire was too short, but it allowed me to bend the tail around which is good for variety.

I found a little bit of time to fiddle with things on Sunday afternoon, which saw me follow through on my threats to mould the sole Ogre knight torso I had made the previous day.

The Clone Wars begun have...

MOAR Ogres! Looks like I need to patch up the guy's breastplate, but this is still going to save me a lot of time. As of now, I already have 2 copies of the original.

My main progress was made last night, when I sat down for a couple of hours and really tried to complete the wolves. Here is how they ended up.

3 Mournwolves. They even have ears in the right place now.

The prototype got an ear-job, grew a toothy snarl, and got his fur cleaned up on some of the bald patches and places where the Mournfang was wearing material of some sort (around his neck, largely. I tried cutting that bit off one of the models before assembly, but it left jagged holes all around the join, so still needed plenty of green stuff. Bit of a failed effort).

The other side. Despite being the prototype, I think he's the pick of the 3 I've done.

This guy proved harder with the open mouth. The teeth in particular were hard to model (as I suspected they would be). In the end he got false canine fangs made out of nails. I may try to file them a bit later, but I was getting very frustrated and desperate at the time.

The final guy isn't showing teeth at all. He looks a little odd in the pics, but I'm happy enough with him in real life. At least, I was last night. Here's hoping I don't change my mind when I see him next...

From the other side.

I'm not sure if he's snarling or sneering.

In all, I am basically calling these guys done. They have not been cleaned up around the saddle, but I think I'll do that once the riders are in place. I still want to add some armour to the wolves themselves, but I simply don't have time. I will either do it after the tournament (and after they're painted), or I'll save that for the next batch when I haven't committed to a stupid schedule. All sounds good in theory...