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I'm thinking of starting nids,so i was wondering what paints I need, probs for hive fleet Kraken or levithian.I've had a look at the gw tutorial and was wondering if there are any shortcuts, mainly because I cant afford to fork put for 50 bajillion paints, opinions?

The trick is to decide what colours you want before buying the paint. Think "I want to paint them red and brown" or whatever, then go buy a few shades of red and brown. Just experiment and see what looks good.

If affording lots of different paints is a problem, get them somewhere else. I only know one place that sells paints as expensive as GWs (and even then, you get 5 times as much for the same price).

The big shortcut though, would probably be not mixing two different shades of red to get a third shade of red (if you really want to be that specific, your local craft store will probably have 15-30 different shades of red so you won't have to mix them).

Craftstore acrylics. Works just as well as normal GW ones imo, and dirt cheap (I got a tube about three times the size of GW's paint for 2 bucks. 3 undercoats, 3 base colors, and a tube of white for mixing highlights comes to a tidy 14 bucks, which is not much). If you cant decide on the color, there are army painters that would let you test out your colorscheme before committing to it.

I didn't want to buy lots of paints at once, so I bought a couple of colours as well as a black and white. Then simply mix in different variations of them to lighten or darken your chosen colours. This does you for a while until you get better at painting and want to expand your skillset.

Citadel Washes can help reducing the number of colours and still look good.

Get the most vibrant red, the most vibrant blue, and the most vibrant yellow, as well as black and white. Then pick your main, say 2 colors that you need to have consistent, and buy those. Thats all the paint you need. With red blue yellow black and white, you can make any color out there.

Nids don't have too many chainmail or copper parts, so you dont have to worry about that. Get comfy mixing colors confidently. google a color wheel, and a mixing chart.


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Forgot to mention, get a good spray primer too. I prefer black, because it makes the painting process a bit quicker. When I paint, I like to work from the crevices up starting with shadows, and then working to highlights. Armor black primer is the same tone black as citadel's chaos black, so if you goof up, thats a good combo to have done it with.