Intermezzo: Hinodian Bounty Huntress

I am working slowly but focused (!) on my Melancholia III-project but have recently finished building a Hinodian Bounty Huntress and she is now ready for paint.

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She hails from the hive world of Meiji Prime placed in the Hinode System on the fringes of the Dalthus Sector...

The Hinode System is named after the red giant Hinode, which is a star in its later phases of stellar evolution: Its outer atmosphere being inflated and tenuous, making its radius immense and its surface temperature low. Hinode is placed in an area of space where sun worshipping seemingly is on the rise. This is particularly the case in the neighbouring Profundis System, which falls under the protection of the reclusive Sun Titans who also appear - albeit sporadically - in the sacred Liber Chronicarum of Hinode where they are referred to as sun gods of legend. 

 Hinode

Hinodians on Meiji Prime celebrate the deeply orange and slowly fading light of Hinode as a pure embodiment of the God Emperor and the distant Sol System. Especially the horizon spanning sunset during the almost all-encompassing autumnal season of the sunblazed planet.

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The Hinodian Bounty Huntress is based on the incredible Nurgle Chaos Lord. Inspired heavily by John Blanches excellent Femme Militant! 

 Slaver Huntress, John Blanche © GW

Mary Bones, John Blanche © GW 

She is blind from sun gazing. Apart from an integrated firethrower and solblade she wields a Hinodian shield. Her voluptuousness and bare scalp is a homage to Hinode. She is covered in sacred symbols and relics also in homage to the red giant... 

...oh, and she wears high heel and has a wooden leg in homage to Mary Bones :)

I am a bit rusty in my modelling, so I look forward to the paint job.

Kveld-Ulf finished for the Invitational!

I am happy to say, that I managed to finish my 13th Wulfen Lord Kveld-Ulf, called Modi, (almost) in time for the Invitational deadline. A few weeks ago it was posted with a nice introduction by Migsula on the amazingly inspiring Iron Sleet:

KVELD-ULF, JARL OF THE 13TH, VLKA FENRYKA

Please go and take a look - and be prepared to be sucked in on all the other goodness on Iron Sleet!

An Equinoxe, a Solar Eclipse and two wolves

I will be venturing into the Norwegian boreal for some time to celebrate the coming spring and returning daylight on the Northern Hemisphere. A celebration also relevant here, inspired as FPOA is by equal amounts of day and night, sun and moon.

On March 20th, the day of the spring equinox itself,  the sun was eclipsed by the moon on the Northern Hemisphere, marking the astronomical spring with an amazing celestial occurence.

My travels to the north means that I will be running out of time to finish my Wulfen in time for the Invitational deadline. But he will be travelling with me in crates of paint together with his two finished wolves, one black and one pale white (of course!) and my daylight lamp, so that the threesome can be uploaded when I return from the fells of the north in the second week of April.

Until then I am very honoured to be able to show you two other Space Wolves: First and foremost a recent gift from a very good friend. Ragnar Blackmane in all his ferocious glory. Painted in style by Jakob Rune Nielsen. Secondly my own version painted in the mid-1990es with handpainted banners and a slightly (only slightly) different colourscheme than Mcveys original Blackmane paintjob from the same period.

Jakobs version is amazing and I will try to achieve a similar scheme on the Wulfen: Dark grey, deep gold and red.

13th returned

The 13th Wulfen Lord Modi has rerturned from the unfathomable perils of the Æther with his two Fenrisian wolves! A huntsman loyal beyond measure who has searched for his beloved Primarch in the Eye of Terror for millennia and now, to heed a special calling, returned through the eye to wage war on the foes of his Northern brethren.

The threesome belong to a body of work more than a decade old and it is my contribution to the 1st Invitational over at Iron Sleet.

They take as their point of departure my deep fascination of Nordic mythology grounded as it is in Nordic landscapes and weather. This, I think, makes it a fitting entry in the Invitational - Iron Sleet itself initiated by a group of mad Norsemen working with weather and atmosphere more than anything else.

I began working on the Wulfen Lord and his wolves after returning home from Golden Demon UK 2003. He was intended for the UK Golden Demon in 2004 but I never got around to finish him. Since then he has been lost for almost a decade, probably in the Warp. But a recent spark of imagination and new inspiration from the extremely talented hands of Migsula, who is working on his mindblowingly beautiful Vlka Fenryka, have resulted in the Wulfen Lord and his two Fenrisian wolves going from early WIPs to being finally done and ready for paint.

In 2003 I had built my Space Wolf Lord Odin and his personal entourage of Space Wolf Valkyries in true scale, dwarfing the normal size of standard marines. For the Wulfen Lord I decided to go all in on scale.

As such, 13th Wulfen Lord Modi has been built around a Demon Prince sculpted by Juan Diaz at the turn of the millenium. It has been heavily converted by changing the pose of the original model and adding a large variety of sculpted elements like jewellery, totems, banners, cables, chains and drilled-out skulls. The areas where armour and fur have merged together were all sculpted to show that he, marked as he is by a flaw in his gene-seed and exposed to the perils of the warp for thousands of years, has mutated into a giant wolfman fused with his Astartes armour.

Apart from the remnants of his personal belongings like backpack, shields (the round shield with two interlocking wolves was originally intended for a major Valkyrian Shieldbearer), family emblems and a selection of important battle trophies he is also covered in wolf totems, tributes and seals marking him as the true warrior god he has become. One of the few who have fought alongside Russ himself.

With the wolves I wanted to utilise the idea behind the Invitational in order to emphasize the size of the Wulfen Lord. While the first of his two wolves has been outfitted with a longrange weapon (inspired in part by Neil101s excellent new Envoys of Russ over at Opus Maius) all that remains of the second wolf is a handcrafted Servo Skull still heeding the call of its master.

In his right hand 13th Wulfen Lord Modi still holds aloof - after aeons in the Æther - the family staff of his Primarch adorned with pledges, wows and seals of faith honouring the Alfather (to be added after painting the staff). In his left hand he wields a Lightning Claw, which has merged with his body being one of the few parts of his original Astartes armour still fully recognisable.

The result is a behemoth of man, Astartes and wolf!

The Invitational

In my imagination Iron Sleet is weather.

Numbing weather thundering across the burdened worlds of the 40K galaxy, mesmerising and all-encompassing. More than snow, rain and storm combined. Much more.

It is 40K weather in its rawest form.

A fitting image for the work that is emerging from the warp through the hands - and minds - of Kari, Mikko and Migs over at Iron Sleet, which is very fast becoming a beacon of creativity, artistry and inspiration in the Æther world of 40K.

Apart from Migs mindblowingly beautiful Vlka Fenryka, Fenrisian weather reincarnate, Mikkos excellent Brotherhood of Steal and Karis amazing Hounds of Valon, they have managed to gather together some of the most talented individuals in the hobby in a very short time.

Also, they have just announced the first Iron Sleet Invitational here! 


 

Standing in my Cabinets of Wonders are three very early WIP's of my entries-to-be. If I manage to get them done in time for April 1st they will be in an amazingly good company, so for that alone...

Melancholia III, part I: On Holloways and Harrowed Paths

I have been re-reading Dan Abnett’s excellent Pariah and was once again struck by one of the great concepts appearing in the book. A concept, which in turn have inspired me to begin my third Melancholia project and a further exploration into the ‘anatomy of melancholy’:

In Pariah the city of Queen Mab is criss-crossed with an irregular scheme of holloways and harrowed paths, which, according to Abnett, are sacred ways, streets of the vast city that are distinguished because they felt the actual step of Saint Orphaeus when he trod upon its world during his pilgrimage of grace many centuries before the story unfolds (Abnett, 2012).

The concept may have been inspired by Abnett’s own surroundings in Kent. Here long distance pathways like the North Downs Way and the Pilgrims Way between Winchester and Canterbury run along the chalk ridgeways of the high hills. In some places the ridgeways are linked to the lower levels of the river valleys by sunken lanes and holloways that are routes where footsteps over thousands of years of pilgrimage have worn a passage into the soft chalk. 

In the words of Abnett’s peer Robert Macfarlane in his beautiful book Holloway, which coincidentally was published in 2012 – the same year as Abnett’s Pariah – a holloway is:

A sunken path, a deep & shady lane. A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll & rain-run have harrowed into the land. A track worn down by the traffic of ages & the fretting of water […] They are landmarks that speak of habit rather than suddenness. Like creases in the hand, or the wear of the stone sill of a doorstep or stair, they are the result of repeated human actions.  (Macfarlane, 2012)

In Queen Mab the holloways are silent and dusty, almost all colour gone and flaked, sanded down by centuries of weather. They are home to the destitute and the warblind (Abnett, 2012). Macfarlane echoes this description when he in Holloway describe some holloways also as ‘fearways, danger-ways, coffin-paths, corpse-ways and ghostways.’ (Macfarlane, 2012) 

Many of those that have walked such old ways have experienced them as places within which one might slip back out of the ordinary world and within which ghosts softly flock. For some, walking them is a wordless conversation between ghosts and ghosts-to-be. 

In Melancholia III I will try to convey this - and that some certain old paths are linear only in a simple sense. That some paths are echospaces where past and present - like trees - have branches and - like rivers - have tributaries. That some paths, in the strikingly beautiful words of Macfarlane, are:

[…] rifts within which time might exist as pure surface, prone to recapitulation & rhyme, weird morphologies, uncanny doublings. (Macfarlane, 2012)

Where Melancholia I and Melancholia II were about sight and sound respectively Melancholia III will be all about warblindness and otherworldly, treecovered silence!

The Sanctioned One

What was intended as a last post of 2014 has become the first post of 2015: My third project of the year, which was initiated while preparing for a Golden Demon many moons ago. Back then I was struck by the amazingly vibrant and atmospheric sketches by John Blanche of inquisitor characters roaming the dystopian worlds of the Imperium of Man. In his sketches these characters became weathered in the truest sense of the word - depicting not only the characters but also, and maybe even more so, the worlds they inhabit.
 
Together with Dan Abnett's ongoing series of Eisenhorn, Ravenor and Bequin, which I truly enjoy reading, The Inquisitor Sketchbook by John Blanche has been and still is one of the most important and inspirational publications in my small collection of Games Workshop/Black Library Publications. 

Not only does it give shape to Ressurectionists, Adeptus Mechanicus Cultists, Rogue Traders, Whip Mistresses, Witch Seekers, Sidith Priests, Fire Redemptionists, Chrono Gladiators and Lex Mechanics but it also sparked my imagination and in turn the initiation of my two recently finished Melancholia projects as well as Melancholia III, which is on its way.

During my ongoing process of rediscovery in 2014 I decided to finish the important works I never got around to finish before disappearing into the boreal many moons ago. Many of them have been well hidden for almost a decade but have now resurfaced and are seeing final work done to them. My Cabinet of Wonders is slowly expanding.

My recently finished version of a Sanctioned Bounty Hunter was inspired by a Blanche sketch depicting a Sanctioned Alien Bounty Hunter appearing in his sketchbook. It was intended to be part of a Golden Demon entry a decade ago. This made 2014 a ten year jubilee of sorts and a good year to finish it and in the process give homage to the great and creative artist that was the inspiration behind it.

Furthermore, it is a proper first post of 2015 as it fits very well into the theme of FPOA by showing that the divine light of the Emperor works in truly mysterious ways;

In this case making a hunter of the hunted...

His chains of enslavement are broken and he is standing aloof some shattered remains of his foes. Apart from a lot of added small details like the inquisition seal of sanctioned enlistement, personal totems and various Imperial insignia showing The Sanctioned One's devotion to the cause, he is wielding two slightly altered hunting rifles from his home world, various types of purity seals and handcrafted Xeno bullets. Also he is being assisted by a specially crafted Servo Skull intented to search out the aliens he is sanctioned to hunt...

...the dreaded Tau!