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Hello all.

A little preamble: On December 17 two friends and I going on a pilgrimage to Nottingham to play a game or two at Warhammer World. Now, we all collect Power Armour variants and I thought, this being the last time I'll battle with these guys for at least a year (one of them is off to the land down under for a year and I now live 60 miles away in Greater London). I'm returning to my old stomping grounds for the entire week (15th - 21st) to essentially play a load of 40K as a sort of farewell to my friend. What better than to mark the occasion with a new army!

So that's what I've done. I've put my small Mantis Warrior force on ebay (link in my sig ) and I've bought a Tyranid Swarm, two boxes of Warriors and a box of Zoanthropes with which to start my army. I'll be picking that army up on Monday most likely (from the ever excellent Dark Sphere). Any sales I make on ebay before the 17th will be going toward some Monstrous Creature love for my list, too!

So, yeah, I'm not working until January, so I plan to build and paint 1500+ points of Tyranids in 1 week start to finish.

I must be mad, but I'm motivated and I have a scheme picked out. I'm not a bad painter but I've always been slow and flighty with my commitment to the task but this is my chance to get serious about painting an army!

My scheme is based on the strawberry tree frog:



I'm interpreting that to be blue carapace and red chitin, of course, but rather than the standard feathering on the chitin, I'll be making heavy use of simple black patterning and line highlights. I'll also be making use of adding small spots to the nooks of the carapace (that's nid 'skin', right?) and should be able to bash out a lot of gaunts reasonably quickly that way. I'm toying with the idea of using a metallic blue, but it would take more time than I have I think.

I'm sorry that there's nothing to see right now, but bare with me a little bit. If DS have the stock already then I might get lucky and be able to pick this order up tomorrow and perhaps pick up some Raveners too (love them because of The Last Stand on DoW!). So next up is assembly. I might edit this post to include my army list so far. Watch this space!

Right, well that didn't happen! Painted up 10 gaunts in a swift fashion with drybrushing and hated them. Here is how gaunt v.2 looks. The scheme is down now and I'm happy with it at least, but gaunt v. 3 will incorporate the more common feathered layering you see on Tyranid carapace