The Beer Waaagh: Wolf-Vore Part 1

In this week's post, Ryan dabbles with FIMO, greenstuff, and produces something out of his bits box.

Well, Rock Wars GT is just a few short weeks away, and I decided that since I no longer need to win, I'd make a fun list. Since my werewolf Ogre Kingdoms army uses Blood-Maw as one of its Gorgers, and I recently painted up a Skrag the Slaughterer conversion, I decided the one thing I needed to tie it all together would be a gigantic wolf-headed, overly-large mouthed monster.

First stage: FIMO on Sronax body

First attempt, FIMO on Sronax

The project actually began a few months ago, when Mierce shipped out their first batch of miscasts. This was a great thing for a converter: for a cheap price you got a box of resin that was 95% correct, but just had a bad air bubble somewhere, or a horribly mold line, or something else had gone wrong. I bought a bunch, and decided to make the model in scale with Blood-Maw, I'd start with a Sronax body. I built up an armature out of aluminum foil, glued it to the body, and then coated it with FIMO. Since I was going for a Blood-Maw aspect, I made the mouth gigantic. I wanted this thing to be all mouth, all the time. Well, it works for Blood-Maw, but when you put eyes, ears, and a nose on it... well, Jim Carrey would have expected to see the proportions of this thing in one of The Mask movies.

Sronax Body, from the back

Sronax body, left side

After sculpting the head, I made the teeth for it by taking pieces of resin sprue and sanding them down into round points with a needle file. It was a shockingly fast process, and after a quick pinning, they went right into the gums I'd sculpted. I also worked the transition to the body, and got the fur feathered in from the head to the back and side fur of the Sronax.

Sssmokin'!

The proportions were still wrong, though. Up against Blood-Maw, the size of the mouth was right, but the body was very, very wrong. I was very disappointed, and thought for a while on how to fix it. Eventually, I posted one of these WIPs up on the Mierce Kickstarter comments, and asked for advice. One of the posters suggested I try again, but this time, use Galagaak's body as the base for the model. Fortunately for me, I'd gotten a Galagaak torso in my Fomoraic bits bag, with a big air bubble in the crotch.


Status at the end of the first stage. Blood-Maw for scale.	Stage 1 complete. Blood-Maw for scale.

Second Stage: Galagaak body

Head on the new torso, high mount point

I sawed Galagaak's torso off at the waist (I couldn't use the crotch region), glued the miscast right arm I'd received on it, and then dove into the box to find a pair of legs that would work. I found Uuthuil's, which only had a few air bubbles. They'd require some modification to use, but I had been drinking excessively and was confident in my ability to make it work. After some very delicate prying, I managed to separate the FIMO head from the Sronax body, cleaned the edges, and pinned it onto Galagaak's body, with some FIMO on there for adhesive purposes. I had a Galagaak top right arm miscast, but nothing that would work for the left arm, so I built an armature for it and sculupted it up, using some extra putty to extend his right pectoral to cover the gap where the second arm should have gone.

Head stuck back on after curing the arm and pec

While I now had a body that was in proportion with the head, it felt like a wolf-headed giant rather than a body with a massive mouth. After curing the arm sculpt, I set about cleaning up the model, tidying flash lines, removing barnacles from the legs, and adding a miscast Vras bit where his left hand would need to be sculpted. I wasn't happy with the look of the left leg either, so I sawed Uuthuil's off at the knee, and added a Galagaak hoof.
The position of the head was still bothering me, though.
For the second time, I pried the head off the base model, and this time I pinned it much lower on the chest. Eschewing a neck, I aimed the bottom jaw to align with the stomach, similar to where Blood-Maw's bottom jaw would be. The result was stunning for me.

Third Stage: Repositioned head on Galagaak body


Repositioned head, left side	Repositioned head, from the right

Mane resculpt, from the left

Mane resculpt

I was much happier with the brooding, hulking quality of the new position, but since I'd sawed a lot of the mane off to get the head on in the high position, I now had my work cut out for me again! I added more FIMO, and sculpted the mane back up into the existing one.


End of the third stage, head repositioned	End of the third stage

Fourth Stage: Cleanup and detail work

Nom nom nom!

A few things about the model were still off, and now I'd baked the FIMO four times in some places, so I switched over to greenstuff for the cleanup. I removed the Vras torso I had been using and grabbed another, this time gluing it to a miscast Shaaroc the Reviled hand so that he would be holding the model by the leg instead of around the torso. I sawed teeth marks into the Vras, trying as hard as I could to match the bite pattern of the Wolf-Vore's teeth to the body as though he'd just taken a huge bite out of the body. I sawed the gauntlet off the back of Shaaroc's hand, and green stuffed the wrist joint for stability.

Resculpted feet

The next step was the feet. I sawed Uuthuil's toes off, and build up armatures for the claws. Since my Ogres use Rackham Wolfen as their base models, I attempted to copy the Rackham aesthetic for feet, though I went with four claws instead of the three that Rackham Wolfen use. This being a Mierce model, I positioned the legs so that one foot would have to go up on a rock. The right leg also required some fur texture to bring it in line with the furry Galagaak torso; this was done in greenstuff.

Right elbow fur texture

Finally, the armature on the left elbow was inadequate, and as I'd been working on the model, the thin layer of FIMO over foil had snapped. The brass underneath preserved the arm, but I had to greenstuff the gap to fix the issue. Fortunately, I'd wanted to put some fur on the elbow anyway, so this provided me with a perfect excuse.

Right elbow, from the reverse angle.

Finally, to finish the model, I sawed the barrel of a Skaven Warp-Lightning cannon in half, and pinned it to the right hand. The fluff for the army cites eating Warpstone as the source of the wolf mutation in my Ogres, so it made sense to me that a Gorger would have been attracted to a weapon that uses that food source!

From above, wielding a melee cannon

With that, the model was complete! The following pictures are just detail shots, and a final side-by-side with Blood-Maw.

The resculpted right pectoral, mane, and mouth transition. The torso transition is rougher than I would prefer; a consequence of sawing off the Sronax body and being unable to bind FIMO to the model to feather it adequately.