When my group and I were starting with the HotDQ, they approached the village of Greenest as part of a caravan from Candlekeep. They would find their first battle at desolate river mill, overrun with wolves. I repainted two WizKids D&D minis for this encounter.

Of course this was the first clue of the Cult of the Dragon attacks that plagued the area, as the raiders sweeped through a couple of days before. Now, the dead bodies of the inhabitants lay in the yard and wild animals came to feast on the corpses. I had my heroes encounter a couple of wolves, lead by a dire wolf.

For this, I used the first repainted miniatures from the old Dungeons and Dragons miniture lines by WizKids: The Winter Wolf (#60 from the Underdark Set) and the Timber Wolf (#27 from the Deathknell Set). I also used a Reaper Bones dog familiar and the metal version painted as wolves, as I don’t have enough real wolf minis.

Preparation, Basing, and Priming

The WizKids minis are nice plastic minis, but they come with a boring black base and the factory paint job is just okay-ish. It looks good on some of them, but the minis all don’t have any highlighting or shading. So, even for tabletop use, just creating a nice base and doing some highlights and shadows would make the mini so much better than the factory paint job.

After cleaning the figures in a soap bath, I did my usual thing: Glueing some sand and little stones on the base, and using the airbrush to prime them black and dust them with white primer. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of these steps.

Painting

The paint job is pretty basic. I followed the tutorial from byron of the Element Games Boards. It involves different stages of drybrushing and washing the figure with different greys and browns. That’s it. After that, I added the details (eyes, maw, teeth, claws) and painted the base. Finally, I added static grass and moss and sealed the mini with matte varnish spray.

The Timber Wolf was painted the same way as the Winter Wolf. Here are the both of them together: