Mournwolves finished!

Well it's just after midnight before Empire in Flames, and the Mournwolves are finished! Not only them, but the Ogre Halberdiers and Sabretusk are done as well.

My Mournwolves, ready for action.

Mournwolves ready for paint!

Actually, the title is slightly misleading. It should really read "almost ready for paint". But it's so close that it might as well be true. Last night was a night of pretty intense modelling, interrupted for an hour or so when I went off to lose at indoor soccer (boo!). I started as soon as I got home, which was a bit before 6pm. I headed for bed at just before 1am. So it was probably 5-6 hours spent at the painting table, labouring away on these guys. And for my efforts, they are now basically ready to be painted.

My Mournwolves basically finished, although they need a banner.

Mournwolf rider progress

Time continues to tick by (as it tends to do). I now find myself with only 3 nights left before Empire in Flames, and I have a lot to do. I didn't post an update yesterday because the previous evening had been a write-off with no chance to make any progress at all. This meant I was pinning a lot on last night to make up for lost time. Unfortunately, I didn't come close to what I was hoping to achieve.

An ideal scenario would have seen me complete the Ogre riders for the Mournwolves, meaning everything was ready to be undercoated and painted. It sounds pretty unrealistic perhaps, but I was hoping to make use of moulds to clone certain components so that 3 riders would really be not much more effort than 1. Good theory, eh? Well, real life is never so simple. For starters, I didn't have enough cloned rider bodies. I had 3 bodies in total, but one of them was the master, and I try to keep the master untouched in case I need to re-make moulds with it later. I put in the green stuff to make another rider clone, but it meant that guy was never going to be finished.

Next I realised that I was about to run out of the arms I was planning to use as the base for my "Ogre knight" arms. As in, I was down to a single copy of each arm. And I didn't have moulds to make more. This was a big problem, and saw me immediately melting down other moulds to free up enough Instant Mold, making moulds of these last few arms, and throwing some green stuff in immediately. Then at least I had some backups on the way, even if I was about to basically break my own rule and modify my master copies. Ah well, time was short.

The moulds I was frantically making last night, complete with their first cloned components.

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...

Building the Mournfang Wolf

I made decent progress on my Mournfang prototype last night, but he's still not finished. Some things remain to be done, and others may require some rework. As of now, this is what he looks like:

Starting to look more like a wolf and less like a Mournfang

From the other side

Maiming Mournfangs

Off with his saddle, toes, upper rear legs, the top of his head, part of his face, what passes for a tail... Poor guy.

Last night I sat down and started to work on converting my Mournfangs into wolves. Well, I started work on one of them, anyway. He will be my prototype. Given that I really have no idea what I'm doing, I figured a prototype might be a sensible place to start. As I sat down and started to analyse the model (with a Wolfygryph alongside for comparison), I realised just how much I was going to have to do. The following is the rough list of what needs to be done to make a Mournfang into a wolf, as per my requirements:

• Cut down the saddle attached to the model’s back (without even using the extra saddle bits, it’s still way too tall)
• Fix the head. This means lengthening the snout, narrowing and hiding the back of its existing mouth where the big tusks are meant to be attached, cutting all the lumpiness off the top of its head, and maybe doing something to make the ears more prominent
• Replace the ugly 3-toed feet with paws
• Build up the model’s rump to a reasonable level in proportion to the rest of it
• Give it a proper wolfy tail
• Try to change the proportions of the legs a bit, in particular the upper section of the hind legs, which are totally different from a wolf’s
• Cover all the bald spots with fur

Another Empire in Flames

Despite having made resolutions not to enter too many tournaments this year, it doesn't mean I'll be steering clear of them entirely. Empire in Flames is one of the annual events that we host at the club, and it's coming up in less than 2 weeks. I was uncertain about entering, however I was kind of talked into it by Nick. He was very tricksy, and basically got me to think about it as a modelling project. This was far more appealing than entering it competitively, so it got my attention.

The reason EiF presents opportunities from a modelling perspective is that it's trying something a bit different this year. Instead of regular armies of about 2400 points, players will be bringing 2000 points, of which 500 points are an allied force. So it's 1500 points from the main list and 500 points from another army. In effect the 500 point army is a force in its own right, so much adhere to all the usual restrictions (must have a general, minimum 25% core, minimum of 3 non-character units, etc). This makes things a bit rigid, as you're effectively cutting the 500 points up into at least 4 bits (a character and 3 or more units). I was finding the idea of that a bit off-putting – you're basically being forced to use the 500 points to field some chaff, which didn't really appeal to me.

As I say however, Nick managed to talk me around. He got me excited by the thought of fielding an Empire army with Ogre allies – specifically, Empire Ogres dressed the same as their Empire allies. I have always stated that one of the end goals of my Ogre unit filler project was to have enough of them to be able to pull them out of the Empire units and field them as a themed Ogre Kingdoms army in their own right. Well, EiF has basically become a step toward that eventual goal.