Making Grey Hunters look like scouts

[skeletoro]

Space wolves have a few methods of making their units outflank. Amongst them is Bran Redmaw, a forge world character, who has Saga of the hunter (granting him outflank and stealth) and also grants another grey hunters unit the infiltrator USR. This, this one character would allow you to outflank 2 grey hunter packs.

 

I'm thinking it would be nice to distinguish these models by shifting their aesthetic subtly towards that of the sniper scout. Giving them cloaks and having some of them posed as snipers (potentially even lengthening their bolter barrels slightly) might be a nice touch to distinguish these marines from the other packs in the army.

 

I'm not sure the best way to go about doing this though. The space wolf pack box does come with some wolf pelt cloaks, which is a start. However, I'd like to try and make these cloaks look a little more functional (if that makes sense) so that you can imagine the grey hunter actually having the cloak wrap around his shoulders, like the top two models in this pic. The cloaks that come in the box set look more ornamental.

 

One way of getting a more full cloak would be by doing the fairly well-known chaos warriors conversion, which would give my marines cloaks that come over their shoulder pads. However, I wouldn't want to cover up the entire squad's shoulder pads (just the occasional model - the remainder could have their cloaks flung back) and I would want to ensure that the models didn't look "pre-heresy" - I want them to be wearing clearly identifiable power armour. Could the chaos warriors cloaks be combined more conservatively with power armour?

 

As a reference, the center figure on the space wolf codex looks about right: a bulky cloak but still clearly identifiable as power armour.

 

Are there any better ways of modelling cloaks (not full robes, and not ornamental, non-functional "capes") on power armoured models? I could go the green stuff route, but I'm not great at it.

 

An alternative to trying to model full cloaks would be to just make sure they had sufficient capes, pelts on their shoulder pads and on their belts, and then painted the pelts (and the grey hunters' helms perhaps) white, to allow them to blend into their snowy environment. Combined with Redmaw's white heraldry, that might shift the palette of the models towards white quite dramatically, making them look distinct with minimal work.

 

The other idea I had was to give some of the models the "wolf scout" heads, which have visors and hence look a tad more "scout"-ish.