Arjac Rockfist The Anvil of Fenris

Arjac from the Space Wolves Codex

Having finished painting my own Arjac Rockfist, I thought I would use this post to look at the concept art we had of the man when the Space Wolves Codex first came out, what I did in terms of modelling in my own Arjac and finally how my model compares to the recently released official model.

From the artwork in the Space Wolves Codex we can see that Arjac has a right-handed storm shield, left-handed thunder hammer, an anvil on top of his suit of terminator armour with what appears to be a wolf pelt cloak fastened to his shoulder pad and going down his back.

The only other things to note on Arjac is that his storm shield looks huge in this picture and his thunder hammer can be thrown and cannot have any sort of cabling joining the hammer to his arm.

This then brings me on to the model I created to represent Arjac (at a time well before GW got round to releasing their own model, like many, many others out there).

The items to make storm shield/thunder hammer/anvil are talked about in the work in progress post I put up a few days. In my mind the anvil is pretty much spot on, the storm shield is the right size (i.e huge) but is more curved than the angular art work drawing and the thunder hammer I reckon looks epic, but has quite some differences from the art work.

The trickiest part of this Arjac was getting the right handed storm shield as all storm shields seem to be for the left hand only. This lead to me writing a post on converting storm shields to the right hand. In that example the arm is from a wolf claw, but with Arjac I used a right handed storm bolter arm, trimmed it down then added green stuff to add in the handle details for the shield.

I also think my Arjac head could do with a clean shave to accurately mirror the art work, but I only had the one head left when I was putting him together so I had to go with that rather than try locating a bald headed man.

I also decided with this model that I wanted the shoulder pads to be more epic than the usual terminator ones. I bought them from Ebay from a seller called Anvil Industry, their Ebay store can be found here. They needed a little bit of modification to fit onto the shoulders/below the pelt, but not much and they did fit pretty well.

The rest of the model came straight from the Space Wolves Wolf Guard Terminator box set, which meant little to do on the conversion front from this point, just the selection of the right legs and torso to suit my idea of Arjac. Having the pelts of two wolves on their helps to make him stand out above my other Wolf Guard Terminators, which he should do in his position as Grimnar's champion.

And then we had the Games Workshop release of Arjac Rockfist, which shares many of the same characteristics as the original art work, but also has a few differences.

The shield on the new model looks far to small and round to be compared to the drawing, but has a nice amount of detail on it, the thunder hammer looks a good size for smashing and throwing and has the same look as the art.

Arjac is also bald, which lines up nicely with the codex drawing, but appears to be lacking in wolf/fur pelts which appear to be present on the picture.

Arjac model released by Games Workshop

While I believe that the new model is a nice model, I also think it is lacking in, for want of a better word, epicness to really depict the pure strength and standing of the Astartes that Logan Grimnar called his champion.

While my own model may or may not deliver that feeling in everyone is not mine to say, but I feel that he is a giant that can command the stat line and story behind him. I am looking forward to running my freshly painted Arjac in battle very soon.

Thanks as always for looking, hope to see you again.

Arjac Rockfist - Painting Progress

An update today on my progress with Grimnar's Champion Arjac Rockfist. He is made up of bits from the Space Wolves terminator box set, Maximini Thunder Hammer, Scibor Storm Shield and the anvil is from the Warhammer Fantasy Dwarf banner.

When I start painting a model I make a general mental note of what each area of the model is and whether the final finish on it is going to be armour, bone, metal, gold, fur, skin etc. Then I will paint each element of the model in a starting base colour, wash it then build it up to the final colour I want.

For instance, Arjac here has several metal areas (hammer head and shaft), the shield, the anvil, gaps in the knee arm and elbow pits, various dog tags and chains which are based with boltgun metal. The fur was painted in Shadow Grey while the lining was based with Gory Red (Vallejo Game Colour), with all bone areas covered with Scorched Brown as was Arjacs' face. A 3:1 mix of Fenris Grey to Light Grey (VGC) was then applied to  the terminator armour.

One wash of Badab Black was put over all areas excluding the armour once the first layer paints were dry, with a wash of Devlan Mud applied over the armour.

Well, that is as far as I have got with him. There will be a lot more progress with him in the next couple of days and I will update the blog as I get him complete.

Thanks for looking, see you again next time!