Exploring the unexpected rabbit hole of Gryph-Hound Orange contrast paint...

This is the culprit!

A few months back I bought a bottle of Gryph-Hound Orange for a project that was summarily shelved and ebayed within a week of so of spending $$$ on the paint for it. Why? Because me. That kind of stupid shit seems to be what I do best. Anyways, having finally finished the Silver Drakes, I then found myself with about 4 projects that I wanted to start at once. 

I knocked a small one out partially (sorry, not really blog-worthy at the moment), until I came up against the realization that I wiped out my can of matte varnish on the Drakes. Furthermore my new weathering washes (more on them  in a later post) are best used with gloss varnish which I haven't bought in years. Thus a trip to the FLGS was needed, but due to my schedule this was not immediately an option. As of this writing, I still haven't made it there. 

Somewhat mentally paralyzed I reacted as I so often do, by ignoring my to-do pile and instead working on something else entirely: contrast paint. I grabbed two white primed marines out of the horde that Kushial gave to me and summarily slathered 'em down. A bit too heavy as it turns out given that it made a bit of a mess around their feet. Nonetheless they looked pretty good for a base coat and as advertised it was damned easy to apply for a good, full coverage.

My new dilemma marines.

Real Life brought hobbying to a stop yet again for a few days and somewhat dangerously, in the back of my mind I found myself left with a quandary: What the fuck am I going to do with orange marines???

Start a new army (duh) assuming the rest of whatever paint scheme I come up with is also quick and easy. So, with that in mind...to the google!! Searching for: 'Orange Space Marines' whilst pointedly ignoring all references to homebrew UT marine armies (yes they do sadly exist...I've seen them on the table top in Knoxville). 

Not much really caught my eye, so I decided to create my own chapter and it is at this point that I should remind you to remember that all I have is two base coated contrast test/technique learning marines!

Yes this is how my brain works*.

Looking thru my decals and settling on the Space wolves decal sheet for some dumb reason the name search was on:

Helhounds/Hellcats spelled with both one and two 'L's (using the blood claw paw decals, sadly there's only one black paw per sheet...moving on)

Fire Wolves

Burning Wolves

Inferno Wolves

Only to be followed by the realization that I really just liked the image below which I found early on in my google search for any pre-existing chapters using the above names yet haven't any hope in replicating in any way...

Pure awesomeness!

Giving up I finally just settled on resurrecting one of my long defunct (pre-blogging) homebrew space marine chapters (yes, I've had several):  The Desert Wolves.

I was about to go on into my recollections of the Desert Wolves, but hell that'll be a likely long-winded blog post in it's own right. So I'll do just that as a follow up here in a bit...after I get some more paint on those two orange marines above, and then decide on whether or not this is a project even worth following up on or not.

*It's a form of madness really...