Over the last three weeks I batch painted three Barbed Hierodules:
Parts layout for one Hierodule, with sprue still on most of the parts.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Body details
guns and talons
body from the bottom
back plate
inside of the back plate
.
upper teeth
legs, back spires, and base
base details, showing the built in rippers
and ready to prime
Automatically Appended Next Post:
For the majority of my Tyranids I'd used skull white primer. The local GW was out of skull white, so I tried wraith bone. Hierodules are different enough aesthetically from the new bugs that I felt a slight difference in color would be fine. It turned out that the wraith bone worked better with the sepia wash I use for the flesh tone, and I'm going to switch over to it for further models.
torso after priming
The Forgeworld material was just as annoying as always. In particular, when cleaning the flash off, I had chipping/damage on the carapace plate above the knee on all three models. The end product isn't too bad, but I may eventually go back in a putty up a repair.
For the bases I did a basecoat of mournfang brown, followed by a layer/heavy drybrush of zandri dust, followed by a lighter but still strong drybrushing of ulthuan grey.
I then washed with agrax earthshade, followed by a second, lighter drybrush with the ulthuan.
The rippers then got a coat of sepia
The general pattern for my Tyranids is sepia flesh, green carapace, weapons, and claws. The carapace starts with castellian green, then gets drybrushed up with naggaroth night and moot green. Teeth and claw edges get sharpened up with extra moot green, I then gloss the entire carapace with 'ardcoat.
Body with sepia and base green layer...
...then purple drybrush...
and followed up with bright green drybrush.
The same process for the shoulder plates...
...arms...
...guns...
...feet...
and spires.
There are six spires for each Hierodule, so I ended up with 18 of them floating around my workspace. They tended to get poked at as I was waiting for other things to dry, forgotten about, remembered, poked at again, knocked on the floor, hunted for, picked up, and forgotten about again. They were like the bits version of termagants: kinda always around, getting underfoot and put in the finish up tomorrow bin.
The exposed muscle on the limbs and the mouth were done the same way. I started with a base of mephiston red, layered with evil sun scarlet, then washed with casandora yellow. Casandora yellow is a reddish/orange shade that I had picked up months ago as part of a Genestealer Cult project that I never finished. I in general hadn't been doing a wash layer on the red flesh, and decided to try the casandora mostly because I had it in front of me. I quite like how it worked.
The final assembly went smoothly. The only issue I had was being impatient with the spires, and not giving them sufficient time for the glue to set.
I deeply enjoyed this project. I've been wanting to build Hierodules for a long time. They had all of the normal problems of Forgeworld, but the nice thing about Tyranids is that you can have a lot of odd lines and miscasts and still look good.
