Heresy on a budget.

Ahoy once again.

In the next couple of weeks/months, my local GW is once more embarking on a campaign, this time for 40k. As per the usual drive to bring in money for the store, the requirement is starting a new force and building it up as the campaign progresses.

With this new incentive provided, a lot of the regulars are looking at Heresy era forces, with Heresy era Thousand Sons popping up already. Keen to keep up with the cool kids and stay home with the downies, i've been looking at Heresy stuff, torturing myself browsing Forgeworld and looking at the excellent work of folks like Templarscrusade01 (check out his Youtube channel if you haven't already, it's well worth it).

So what to do when you've got the desire but your wallet is lacking the funds?

Well rather than despair, i dug back through dozens of pages of Warseer painting logs and the interwebs, looking for old school Heresy armies. How did people do it before Forgeworld launched their range?

A lot used third party parts. This isn't an option in my case, because a) i want to use the army in a GW store and events and b) I have issues with some of the companies releasing said parts.

So how else?

My wandering through the interweb eventually found me at this site:
http://space-wolves-grey.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/how-to-make-pre-heresy-space-wolves.html

And bam! just like that, i had my army.

This great blog posted a tutorial on making pre-heresy Space Wolves using the Space Wolf squad box and Chaos Warriors from Warhammer Fantasy. Perfect. The tutorial itself goes step by step on how to convert them, which was a massive help. I urge anyone reading this to take a look at his blog and be sure to leave him lots of nice comments, because it really was the inspiration i needed.

So on Sunday i dashed to GW and grabbed the nearest box of puppies and Warriors and got to work with a craft knife.

 These are the first two to be painted up. I followed the aforementioned brilliant tutorial, using the Warriors of Chaos and Space Wolf kits, combined with a couple of heads from my bits box - in this instance a Grey Knight helmetless head and a cut down Berzerker head.

 I've still got to finish off some knotwork patterns on their cloaks, but for the most part they are ready to take the field. They just need a lot of friends to arrive.

The reasoning for the beardless Grey Knight head, is because this is an early Space Wolf force. This is back in the days when Terrans still fought in their ranks, and they went around calling themselves The Rout.

So adding to my massive backlog of things to paint are a squad of ten converted Grey Hunters. I'm planning on another two squads of ten after this, before branching out into some of the other areas of the Space Wolf codex. I'll be using the 40k rules for now, but with luck i'll switch over to the 30k legion list just as soon as i can scrape some pennies together.

Until next time i remain,

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Pope.