Warg Chieftain - Part One

Over at The One Ring I'm taking part in the February Hobby Challenge and I'm going to paint up a Warg Chieftain and four Wild Wargs. However, I HATE the old plastic LotR Wild Wargs - only two poses and I just don't like the style. The old metal models with riders look better, but sadly they were ONLY produced with riders so no joy there. I'm going to build my unit from the Hobbit Fell Wargs. The plastic kit comes with six different poses and separate heads means much more variation. I also like the style of the monsters better.

Now this brought another small dilemma. I wanted to have a Warg Chieftain to lead the pack, but the official GW model is of the 'breed' I'm not fond of. If the original plastic set had the variations of the later I might suffer through because I DO like the Warg Chieftain. This required me to convert a Warg Chieftain from the Fell Warg kit to match the rest of the models. Certainly I could have just painted the model different enough to stand out, but where's the fun in that? Besides the chance to add a unique character model to your army is always worth the effort!

Diving into the kit, I didn't immediately see a simple solution. I wanted to mount the model in a similar pose to the GW version, climbing up onto some rocks. Not only would this be dramatic, but it would raise the leader above the rest of the pack. None of the models really fit the bill so it was time to start tinkering. I cat all of the parts away from the sprue and begin to try different pieces on a base with some loose stones. After a while I came up with the perfect solution.

One of the models springing forward had a separate right paw. I realized by cutting a small notch in the rear leg I could increase the height of the pose. I needed another front paw that looked to bearing weight...

This running model had the perfect limb which I amputated and then carefully carved away the rear paw which was touching the front leg.

It took some further fiddling and sorting through my pile of stones to find the most natural fit, but finally I have ended up with this...

All I needed was a minimal amount of greenstuff and I can see some more work needs to be done with a file, but I think this worked out great and I can't wait to paint it! Finished shots in a couple of days...