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Okay so it happened again. As I briefly described in this month's painting contest thread, my mistake was buying the Starter Set when I saw it going at a discount at a local gaming shop - on paper a good bargain for the slowly-growing Empyrean Crusade, Terminator Captain, five of the new Terminators, and five Infernus marines, none of which I had already; the Infernuses in particular were a lure since the standalone squad box has ten of them, and the Crusade is really just a 'have a go at painting all the new marines' thing (they're all new to me) so I only really want five for the minimum squad size. GW prices being what they are, even throwing in all the redundant Tyranids, the starter worked out to about a zillion dollars cheaper than it'd be to buy the various marine models individually (I haven't run the numbers on what it'd be to wait for the Combat Patrol magazine which'll have the same minis, but that's not launching in Australia for some time, and just getting one box was easier anyway). And if it had been the end of the day that'd have been the end of it, I'd probably have gone home, posted a note on the local gaming group discord to see if any of our bug boys wanted reinforcements, and never thought twice about it - but I was shopping on my lunch break half-way through December, so I came back to a quiet afternoon at my desk at work with nothing much to do besides look at the box and daydream, and the treacherous thought snuck into my head: how close is this to 1000 points of Tyranids?

Turns out I was already there, after I opened up the Munitorum Field Manual which, along with the rest of 10th edition, work hasn't noticed I'm keeping on their server so I can look it up from any screen in the office, and took into account the odds and ends I had at home. For the local GW store's birthday they do a painting contest with whatever leftover minis of the month and other unneeded minis they have to hand, and you keep the one you paint; they didn't need the Neurotyrant they'd painted up for the Leviathan launch now everyone knows what's in the box and it's not used for the little starter games they run, so it was sprayed white and put among the rejects, and I got to the store early enough to snap it up. (My speed paint wasn't great, being mostly just fleshtearer red contrast and then a drybrush of bone on the armour plates, and a few details quickly picked out, but it's a big mini and I only had an hour, I think I did okay.) Plus I got into this hobby via Space Hulk, and never got rid of those plastic minis, so with Space Hulk, Deathwing, Genestealer, Space Hulk v2, and a second v1 box I inherited from the gaming club at university since it was so far out of date by then, that's far more genestealers than the 30 you can legally field. 945 points including the starter set 'nids, so drop in a couple of enhancements and that's my 1K force. I know I joked that I started my Crusade by accident, but I really got into running a Hive Fleet by accident.



Anyway, here's the first lot, which I completed for the Frugal challenge, since you can't get much more frugal than free - they were also simultaneously entries for the local group's painting challenge, which doesn't judge quality of paintwork, you just get points (which don't do anything, it's just for fun and motivation) for completing things, and so long as they're good enough for the tabletop it's up to you to decide what standard of paint you're content with. Even with New Army enthusiasm (let alone down the track when it'll have worn off) I couldn't see myself completing 30 Stealers and 20 Termagants if I did them one at a time with careful attention to detail like I try to do with my Legionaries, so after a bit of googling for inspiration on a colour scheme, I glued a Stealer's arms on and went at it with drybrushing blue-grey over a black spray, followed by a quick (and deliberatly not slow and precise) application of dark red contrast, then just picked out its eyes, teeth, tongue, and those little openings on their thighs which I'd decided would be glowy bits, and I found I was pretty happy with the result, for very little investment of time and effort (Tyranid models are made for fast drybrushing, I've discovered). For the bases, likewise I developed a quick approach that yielded a result I was okay with: brown contrast over some technical mud, then green drybrush, then a tuft of grass stuck on with pvc glue. Like the minis themselves, the bases are pretty ordinary when you look at them closely, but en masse I think they're quite acceptable for something I can do in fast batches.

The Neurotyrant got a bit more attention, befitting a character mini, but I wanted everything to match so most of him was the same speedpaint techniques - the tentacles were a new colour since I wanted them to look soft and fleshy (I'd initially done my test Stealer's tongue pink, but I repainted it flesh to match the tentacle colour) but done similarly quickly, although I did their final highlights, and the little webs of Tyranid-stuff infesting the terrain, with a detail brush, and the brain got a gloss varnish on top of the same glowy green I'd done on the Stealer thigh openings, to make it look wet and squishy.



And a quintet of Termagants from the starter set box, which I ran off in about an hour, not counting assembly and the spray primer - again, happy with the result given how little time they took, although I'm being careful not to wade into batch painting in a big way, since I don't want to tire myself out on bugs, however little effort they may individually be. Besides testing my speed these were also to lock down the colour scheme properly, since Genestealers (particularly my old Space Hulk ones) are a bit off-model compared to the now-standard Tyranid look - the 'gants though have a basic version of pretty much all the features of every Tyranid model (in particular the symbiotic weapons, since neither the Stealers nor Neurotyrant have any). As you can see, it's drybrush blue-grey over black for the bone armour and skin - a bit of extra effort on the sides of the head, to make it stand out, plus the skin areas being more curved than the sharp edges of the armour makes it come out a bit paler naturally - then the crimson underbelly (applied over both skin and the armour plates they've got on their undersides), brownish flesh for 'internal organs' (in this case the tongues and the tubes leading into the backs of the guns), and glowy green for those little openings, which going by the sculpts on Genestealers actually ought to be some kind of ribbed sheath covering the skin, but I'm just treating them as an opportunity to add a little splash of bold colour to an otherwise pretty desaturated palette. Unlike the stock photos I'm deliberately trying to use exactly the same colours on the weapons as on the bodies - it'll be more obvious on things like the Barbgaunts and Biovore when I get around to them, I feel like the shapes of the sculpts alone (and how the weapons tend to have a higher proportion of 'organ' to 'outer skin' in some places) will be enough to make them easy to identify on the tabletop, and having them all coloured the same will push the idea that they're not 'Tyranids' holding 'weapons', but 'body Tyranids' bonded to 'weapon Tyranids', all the same genetic stock just made in different forms.

Anyway, besides many more Genestealers and the rest of the starter set, I put some of the Christmas gift card splurge towards more bugs - in the wings currently I've got a couple of Broodlords (one of them's the Brood Coven Patriarch version, I just wanted two Broodlords without them being identical miniatures), Deathleaper, a Biovore, some Barbgaunts, and I think there're some Hormagaunts in the stack of boxes somewhere. I'm still quite happy gaming with my chaos warband (especially with the Creations of Bile detachment to play with, I was expecting those Grotmas detachments to be a bit of fluffy comedy to play once over Christmas and then forget about, but I had a go with the Bile rules last game evening and it's a power fist of a detachment) so I'm in no rush to get the Tyranids to game-readiness, but given the speed of painting I'll be including a few of them in every month's to-do pile along with the more time-consuming marines and heretics.

After going through a few naming options (back in 3rd edition I randomly came up with the name 'Hivefleet Ravenna' - not to use myself, just as a random name; it's an Italian city/province, but it sounds like Tyranids) I ended up naming my speedpainted hive the Morbus Gravis Strain, because I like the notion of classifying Tyranids as a galactic-scale infection rather than a military, and as a shout-out to Morbus Gravis, the first two books of Druuna, which if you don't know is a borderline pornographic (except for a couple of volumes, when it falls over the border entirely; Slaanesh would approve), problematic, but visually lavish European comic saga, and the palette used in the first arc with its stark desaturated decayed urban environments infected with vivid fleshy orange mutant monsters influenced my painting here.

That one Genestealer missing an arm (centre right in the Neurotyrant photo) is named 'Lefty', by the way. Something about Tyranids prompts me to go really silly, there's some more goofy conversions in miniatures yet to be painted, although Lefty wasn't intention, just one of the ex-uni minis who'd taken damage somewhere along the way before the box wound up with me. I think it's their absolute lack of personal expression, it makes them the ultimate straight man to bounce jokes off of.

Damn, I love those boys. This colour scheme rules, it really fits 'nids. Also all [*] for the Lefty's hand

 Magos Nintendus wrote:
Damn, I love those boys. This colour scheme rules, it really fits 'nids. Also all [*] for the Lefty's hand

Thanks - I've taken liberties with the specific colours, but my googling ultimately led me back to the 3rd edition Codex Tyranids cover, where they first made the shift from 'colourful extragalactic gribblies' to 'tidal wave of teeth and claws lunging out of the shadows'.

Anyway, some more done, and as always I had some fun with them:



This month's contest entry, for 'Surprise', because be honest nobody saw this coming. So what happened was simply that I was putting the spore mines together, and randomly noticed that they were about the same size as a Lego minifig's head, and thus Lord Bentley Spore-Mine was born. He's from the Derbyshire Spore-Mines, you understand, not those low-born Yorkshire Spore-Mines - as such he must be deployed via Biovore, as no true Spore-Mine would lower himself to deploying at the start of the battle like a commoner.

Again, to keep everything consistent, it's all speed-painted (except for Lord Bentley's hat of course) - which leaves the leggy half of the Biovore looking pretty plain, since its face is pretty thoroughly hidden (I did sneak the tip of my brush in there to brush a little white onto its teeth, for what that's worth), and the heavy armour over its top conceals the red underbelly for the most part. I did think about going a little more elaborate on the gun half of it to compensate, but in the end decided to just stay true to the formula, and aside from the fleshy mine sacs and interior of the barrel just let the sculpt speak for itself. I don't think I'll ever bother getting a Pyrovore (I'm not being exclusive, but I would like to have the hive mostly composed of OG Tyranids), but sometime down the line - after I'm done putting money aside for the Emperor's Children army box - I'll probably get another Biovore, just to have at least a small proper battery and swarm of mines. I was a bit taken aback by how many limbs are up in the air - I checked the box to make sure I wasn't assembling it wrong - so with the next one I think I'll be doing some removing of pegs to make the 'hips' ball joints so I can have it in a more stable stance, just to set the two apart a bit.

I did also consider giving every spore mine a hat - I've got plenty of Lego spares, pirate hat, cowboy hat, and so on - but I decided it was funnier if there was just the one.

And also done, because I wanted to see how well the colour scheme would work on their integrated launchers, the Barbgaunts:



Pretty well, I think - as much as I like the idea of every component creature having the same colours because they're all the same overall lifeform, I was concerned that not having the launchers have some of their own palette would make them difficult to spot on the tabletop, but between the base size, the very similar poses, and the distinctive heavy shoulder and back carapace as well as the gun, I don't think there'll be any issue (no doubt why GW gave them that distinctive back, of course). The brains got some Ardcoat, like on the Neurotyrant - I decided to keep that purely on the brain, and leave the tentacles linking it to the gaunt head in the stock 'squishy internal organ stuff' pinky-brown flesh shade, which I'm coming to quite like for how it's bright, but also just kind of icky-looking contrasting against the pale grey carapaces.

No funny conversions on these ones, but I did name them: Barbara Bach, Barbara Bain, Barbara Dunkelman, Barbora Kodetova, and Elizabeth Mongomery (because with humanity having forgotten so much of its own history, even after eating billions of human brains the hivefleet's knowledge of supernatural sitcoms of the 1960s is hazy, so it got Bewitched and I Dream Of Jeannie mixed up).

February was a big month for the Morbus Gravis Strain, since it was the last month of the local gaming group's summer painting challenge, and I wanted to get to 100 Painting Points for the Platinum rating (which means nothing at all, it's just incentive), so because they're so fast I painted a lot of Tyranids. More to come, these are just the ones I've got the backgrounded photos of handy right now.



First up, from the Starter Set, the Rrrrsssk - they feel very strongly that being called 'Von Ryan's Leapers' is imperialist erasure of Tyranid culture.



And just bought in a box on their own - because while I'm sampling whatever's available, I do have a particular fondness for the OG Tyranids, and want to collect at least the unit types that were present in the 3rd edition codex - the Hormagaunts, who don't have a silly joke attached to them.

Morbus Gravis, eh?

I wholeheartedly approve.

Lord Bentley Spore-Mine needs a retinue of batmen and sycophants.

That one model makes me smile every time I see it.

Thanks folks Back home now, so I have access to all my photos, not just the ones I'd dropped into the local gaming group's discord that nobody's noticed I keep an eye on at work. So here's what else I did in a very busy February (besides a bunch more Genestealers, you know what Genestealers look like already).



First up the starter set's Psychophage, the first (and so far only) time I've used the big brush in the set of makeup brushes I got from the chemist because the small one's handy for drybrushing - using the big makeup brush let me do drybrush passes on the big back carapace without having 'edges' of where the brush wasn't wide enough, which'd have looked awful. It's nothing fancy on close inspection, but at tabletop distance the carapace turned out very striking. I also slowed down a bit and hand-painted the psycho gas coming out of its smokestacks, doing the best I could with what greens I had to hand. The marine arm being chewed on is in the colour scheme for Morgen Blackblood from the old Combat Cards, who if I'm reading the chapter logo right (it's only half-visible) is a Blood Angel, and his black armour with red highlights suggests either a chaplain or a proto-Death Company marine; whichever, old mate Morg's having a bad day.



Next up a Winged Prime, plus some Termagants just because I finished the batch of five at about the same time - nothing fancy going on here (and no jokes occurred to me during painting), but while they look fairly plain I'm happy with how the wing membranes turned out, since for consistency with when I get around to painting Gargoyles down the track I did them just using my standard palette, with drybrushing over contrast paint, rather than slower hand-painting for maximum detail, and I think they're quite reasonable.



And here's Deathleaper, or rather Deffleaper - I didn't notice until I'd put the model together but I must've snapped off the tip of one of his face tentacles while I was clipping it off the sprue, so I gave it a little dash of green to suggest it's been cut off and is bleeding, and decided he's got a speech impediment as a result. I also left the 'skirt' pieces off, because I never quite got on board with how they looked, and painted green in the recesses they're meant to slot into on the tail. I don't know what exactly the green's supposed to represent, I use it for eyes, those little ribbed openings on limbs, wounds, whatever the tail's got going on, it's just my 'little details' colour. To tart up the scenery I put on 'smash the empire' from the old Rogue Trader art of a couple of rogue-but-not-chaos marines, maybe their slogan's caught on.



The Broodlords - since I have so many Genestealers (25 painted now - I have more of the old ones but they have old paint jobs on them, and I don't want to paint over my old work if I don't have to, even if it's honestly pretty rubbish) I picked up the Patriarch Brood box to have a second Broodlord (or near enough, different but clearly the same basic thing, nobody's going to be confused by it on the tabletop). These two got characters thanks to my mind wandering - I painted the helmets on the Patriarch's base and in his hand as old-style Minotaurs, but it occurred to me that without the body you can't tell the difference between Minotaurs and Howling Griffons, so the Patriarch's psychic forehead-touch became him scratching his head because he's trying to remember what chapter he was fighting when he got those helmets, and I decided he and the other Broodlord are your classic nerd-jock sibling pair named Nigel Brood and Chad Brood; Nigel's always fussing over details, and Chad teases him about overthinking.



And lastly for today, the Rippers, including Fergit - so what happened is the Morbus Gravis Strain got into a fight with a Waaagh, the Runtherd got eaten and all the gretchin were left to their own devices mid-battle, so Fergit, who'd heard vaguely about the idea of 'being a turncoat' from some Blood Axes talking about military history, switched to the winning side by sticking a dead Ripper on his head and hoping the others would think he was one of them. So far it's working - granted the process of being swallowed up at the end of campaigns is a bit revolting until he gets pooped out again on the hiveship, but he doesn't get kicked as much as he used to in the Waaagh, and nobody tries to steal any of the shiny things he picks up during battles, so all in all he's optimistic.

The top hat sells it. Looks cool!