Tuesday 5 August 2014

Urban Werewolf, AK miniatures - Part 3 of 4

Following on from my previous posts about werewolves one of the reasons I bought them in the first place was that I had been recently rereading collections of old 2000 AD comics and one in particular that I remembered about Judge Dredd battling werewolves, drawn by Steve Dillon from way back in the summer of 1983.
Get down Shep!
In the preamble the authors, Wagner & Grant, mentioned that they wanted to show that the werewolves still had a trace of humanity and he indicated this by showing them still wearing fragments of their clothing. When I first saw the models I wondered if I could produce a similar effect with one of these figures (that's the reason I bought two identical figures in the first place). With this in mind I decided that I would make an urban werewolf.
Original model
Point (or Tail) of no return
In the Judge Dredd story the werewolves are shown wearing ripped and torn trousers but more noticeable is that they don't have tails (I'm not sure if werewolves generally have long tails or not), so obviously the first thing I did was commit myself to the idea and snip off the model's tail with my side cutters. I know I was going to use greenstuff to make the tatty trousers but I thought that rather than simply cover the fur I would file down the metal, hoping this would give the impression that the werewolf was actually wearing the trousers rather than just having them placed on it. With a Sharpie pen I marked the area of the clothing so that I didn't remove too much of the detail down the legs and waist and then filed down the fur detail in the appropriate area.

The greenstuff was applied and smoothed out using a rounded metal handle of my trusty scribe. then using the same scribe I added the seams and also created the shredded edges of the trousers. Once the main area of greenstuff had cured I added the pocket just to give an extra dimension to the model.


Comparison view of the two models 


The claw scratch marks effect were added to the door with a pencil.
As previously mentioned I wanted to give the impression that this werewolf lived in a ruined urban setting as depicted in the old Judge Dredd story. Therefore the base was painted in shades of grey rather than brown and added off cuts of plastic sprue and card to compliment the ravished urban look as opposed to the previous model which had a deliberate rural feel. Powders were used for the rust effect.

6 comments:

  1. Absolutely superb! What a great job Matt, and sad as it may seem, I was just thinking about werewolves and tails myself! I've got an idea for some in the Witchfinder rules and starting looking for suitable models, so this has come at a great time - just as an aside the werewolves in Dog Soldiers don't seem to have tails either!

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    1. Thanks Michael, will be looking forward to seeing your version of a werewolf (with or without tails).

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  2. That is excellent. At first I thought you had just reworked the base, until I read on. Great idea and for me it makes that pose better.

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  3. What a great idea and what a brilliant job you've done he looks superb!

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