Dire Wolves

 I always thought that Dire Wolves would be a cool addition to my Vampire Counts army, but I was less than impressed with the Vampire Counts Dire Wolves models.  The skeletal, corpse-like wolves just don't really appeal to me.  Then I saw this post on the Iron Wolves blog.  If he can use the Chaos Warhounds to represent Fenrisian Wolves (with some greenstuff adjustments), I can do the same thing to represent Dire Wolves!

Hmmm...after some thought and exploring of the GW online store, I came across these:

It's a Warhammer bitz pack, and comes with five wolves.  I'm going to assume the worst and imagine that all five wolves are the same pose.  The upsides are: they definitely look more wolf-like than the warhounds do, they require no conversion work at all, and they are marginally cheaper than the warhounds.  The downside is that they may end up all looking the same (if they're the same pose, but perhaps I could try some pose conversions), and the miniatures themselves are on the old side, and look more "cartoony" than the more modern miniatures.  This will require more thought...