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As a form of light relief from grinding through my traitor guard force I decided to have a little dalliance with nids - which I shall share with you all

Seeing as they are a somewhat secondary thing that I'm going to dip into now and then rather than concentrating fully on I'm going to try and follow a couple of basic guidelines for them:

1) spend as little as possible
2) only get things I want to paint / model rather than worrying too much about army lists

To kick things off I went to ebay a couple of times lately and picked up a few bargain goodies. A badly built/painted carnifex, and a handful of gribblies (5 stealers and 8 termagants) for a combined total of £10.94 including p&p .. not too shabby. At the moment I'm leaning towards Hive Fleet Leviathan for colour scheme, purely because I like it, so that's probably how they are going to wind up. So having stripped and taken apart the carnifex to save his previous owner any shame, here is what I have so far:



So without further ado, some action! Got the fex with the idea of turning it into a tervigon, so first things first the body needed widening -




Whilst it looks like I just hacked it in half.. well, I pretty much did! However, I only had to cut the top carapace as I'd already split the sides. Before reattaching the two halves of carapace with the other sides of the chimney bits on them I stuck a plasticard bar across the centre to set the body sides at the size I want it and glued along the bottom.

This leaves a big gaping hole in the top that will need filled, so as a framework for the new top carapace and central chimney I glued in some aluminium mesh.




Whilst I had the saw out I also hacked off the joining bit of tail and reversed it so it will turn upwards and free up plenty of space for some kind of egg-sac/evil sphincter thing at the back as I'm not too keen on the whole Aliens birthing tube look.



So the basic plan for the weekend is to begin work on the carapace and come up with some designs for the undercarriage, along with stripping the paint off the few painted stealers and gaunts.

Thanks for looking!

Mesh was a nice idea,
Looking forward to seening more.

Well over the weekend I managed to add plenty of bulk to the body. Sadly I have no photos of that as was taking some other pics and camera battery died - doh! So I will sort some out tomorrow after a recharge. After doing some sketches I decided to move away from the spider-esque eggsac at the back like I was originally planning, even though it would go along with the multiple scything talons spider looks. It just doesn't look quite right, so going with a forward facing birthing area. Rather than a simple tube I'm currently thinking more along the lines of the sarlacc from return of the jedi for the orifice. Teeth and that.

Also had major blue peter attacks over the last few days and made a mycetic spore. Its still a WIP as need to tidy up some bits and do a bit of GS detail work but its 90% constructed. Paper mache, hot glue gun, garden wire, few plasticard blades and some filler for the base and voilà! mycetic spore that cost me nothing! Should really have put a model next to it to show scale but its mounted on a cd if that helps you visualise it. You can't see very easily from the photos but its covered in hot glue gun detail to give it that gross alien look. Fancied something a bit more like the codex pic than all the giant mutant eggs people keep using.





C&C welcome as always, thanks for looking and I'll try and get some pics of the tervigon up tomorrow!

Interesting... I'll be watching this blog

Just a quick update for today. Not had time to put the finishing touches on the spore yet but hopefully over next few days I will.

A few photos to show progress on the tervigon. As you can see I've put two of the exhaust things onto the back, still need to add the third and finish off the carapace there. The head that came with it was the 'enhanced senses' one, so off came the donnie darko ears and added some carapace to the head to keep it looking good. Need to add the tail and space for the hind legs to attach and start texturing the birthing apparatus. Not to mention coming up with designs for a base. All good fun though!





Thats all for now. Hopefully have a more exciting update in a week once some real progress has been made.
Thanks for looking - C&C always welcome.

Oh ho ho! This is very interesting.
This is really creative, and you have superb greenstuff skills!

Well it's update time yet again. There has been some progression with this project. Acquired another set of the battle for macragge nids from ebay, almost all still on the sprue. 9 termagants - 2 badly undercoated, 6 genestealers, only enough arms for 5 but no matter as I can just sculpt one into a broodlord, 8 spore mines and the terrain/objective things too. All for the mighty sum of £3.21 delivered! That brings the total spend up to £14.15 - less than a new box of 8 stealers from GW.



Progress is being made on the tervigon. The carapace is done all bar having the spines fitted into the spine holes - looks a bit odd without them in but have dry-fitted a few and looks pretty good with them in place. Added mandibles to the head to make it better match the codex picture. They were just bits that I clipped off the rear of the carapace to make better space. I extended the tail section with some bits of sprue and mulliputted over to bulk out the birthing chamber area and repositioned the legs further forward to give a better impression of supporting the bulk. Also straightened out the tail so that it provides a better flow across the length of the model. Still need to add another plate directly under the rear of the carapace the smooth out that line, along with blending the bulked bit into the underside a bit more, and adding more texture to the birthing tube. Also needs some texture added to the connecting point where the neck meets the body so the head can be added, and obviously the forearms.





Also managed to get a few termagants two thirds painted so thought I would include a pic of those too just to add a little more filling to this update.



Thanks for looking, C&C welcome as always.

Tervigon is near enough built now. Spines added, final detail added to birth tube and its sphincter, hindquarters armour fixed, detail put in the neck surround and added a crest to make it more like the codex pic. Might need another layer on the crest, can't quite decide yet. Just need to adapt a couple of the larger scything talon arms to sit how I want and remove a few mould lines from them then it can be primed.

Photo without arms so you can see the birth tube without it obscured by talons.



Few pics of it with the arms blue-tac'd on - will paint it without them attached as they get in the way quite a bit.




Scale pic of it with a standard marine.


Had quite a bit of fun with this model, despite the mrs asking if I was building a dinosaur..

C&C always welcome

Really cool collection, especially for the price. Your sculpting skills are A+. Looking forward to see how you flesh out the Tervigons lower body and back. Keep it coming.