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10th is upon us! New edition, new models, and a big backlog of bugs to paint. Plus some alliteration.

Have a hive fleet in mind? Or paint scheme?

First up, I’m going to get my Zoanthropes in playable condition. I love brain bugs and I’m looking forward to annoying people with as many as I can put on the table.

Starting off, I have a big pile of Zoeys in various stages of completion. I’ve got a scratch built Neurothrope I originally made as the Doom of Ma’lanti. I made her by slicing up a pair of finecast Zoathropes and sandwiching the heads with some putty.





I have three 5th ed pewter Zoanthropes, one of which had an arm plate fall off, with different color highlighting and basing. I used them as Zoanthrope and Neurothorpes at various points and had them marked so that they would be easy to tell apart in order to track who had which spells.




I have two 5th ed finecast Zoanthropes, one of which is mostly painted and one of which is is partially painted in drunk girlfriend lime green.




I have 15 9th ed plastic Zoanthropes, in various stages of paint, ranging from tabletop ready to mostly primed.



I considered running a unit of old style models and two units of new ones, but decided instead on using the old models as the squad leaders. I’ll get them all up to table top standard, including the two extra skinny ones, and I’ll put rippers on the bases in order to help keep the units distinct.

That’s an impressive amount of floating brains.

Let me guess: you are really looking forward to the Neurotyrant.

Yesterday I took all of the photos and planned out the project. I also did a little priming and started the flesh tones on a few models.



These guys were only about half primed, they needed finished. I'm using wraithbone white.



These had the base layer started. I use the sepia wash for the flesh tones.


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 Nevelon wrote:
That’s an impressive amount of floating brains.

Let me guess: you are really looking forward to the Neurotyrant.

Very much so. I'm very excited for leviathan and have to discipline myself to not rush into before working on other things.

Brains for everyone! This looks like it'll be a lot of fun.

Wow, I wasn't expecting that many Zoanthropes. It will be cool to follow your progress. I'm starting a Tyranids army for 10th,so I'm working on 'nids also.

 Syro_ wrote:
Wow, I wasn't expecting that many Zoanthropes. It will be cool to follow your progress. I'm starting a Tyranids army for 10th,so I'm working on 'nids also.

Do you have a gallery up? Tyranids are a very fun army. I've been playing and painting them for years.


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Todays update is red. I did vents on my squad and the base layer of the brains.

The vents are mephiston red with a layer of bright red over it. The base layer of the brains is the same dark red, nice and simple.







With the vents on the back I can move quickly and be fairly sloppy. The back will get a layer of a strong green carapace over it, which nicely cleans up/hide the sloppy work on the vents. Vents on arms I have to be much more careful with. The sephia wash I use for the flesh color works well, but it is tricky to clean up mistakes on top of it. Often I'll just leave the vents on arms flesh toned, or do a light touch on the tops of the ribbing with a red instead of filling them in. On monsters I'll often paint the vents first, touch up with bone white that matches the primer, then do the flesh wash. I'll probably put up pictures of that in the next couple of weeks, once I finish the Zoey's and start on Screamer Killers.

Next up is the BRAINS!

babelfish wrote:

Do you have a gallery up? Tyranids are a very fun army. I've been playing and painting them for years.

I don't have a gallery up yet, since my Tyranid forces are currently three primed ripper swarms and a single termagant I haven't made the rest yet. When done they will be in my 40k gallery.

You're Zoanthropes are looking good so far, crisp paint job. Are you doing one of the standard hive fleet color schemes or something else? Hive Fleet Behemouth, maybe? Seeing your fondness for Zoeys makes me feel I should get them in my army too. Though I should probably finish a bit more of what I have before a new purchase

 Syro_ wrote:

babelfish wrote:

Do you have a gallery up? Tyranids are a very fun army. I've been playing and painting them for years.

I don't have a gallery up yet, since my Tyranid forces are currently three primed ripper swarms and a single termagant I haven't made the rest yet. When done they will be in my 40k gallery.

You're Zoanthropes are looking good so far, crisp paint job. Are you doing one of the standard hive fleet color schemes or something else? Hive Fleet Behemouth, maybe? Seeing your fondness for Zoeys makes me feel I should get them in my army too. Though I should probably finish a bit more of what I have before a new purchase

Give it time, your bugs will come along.

I don't use one of the standard hive fleet schemes. I like the look of the green and tan. The details of the scheme have changed as I've grown as a painter, learned how to drybrush and do blends, things like that.

We don't talk about the pile of shame. Nor how it just got bigger by a stack of pretty new models.


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I had a short break from updates due to the entire needing to work in order to afford models to paint thing. Plus I took some time to actually play with my models, which is always fun. I took the entire swarm of zoeys to a local RTT, and was very happy with them.

BRAINS TIME! Also, green.

For the exposed brain itself I did:

mephiston red base

layer of evil sun scarlet

layer of emperor's children pink

dry brush of white scar

The veins are genestealer purple over a base of naggaroth night. I then washed the entire thing with druchii violet.

That pretty much finished the brains, so next I started painting carapace. And more carapace. And then some more carapace. Soooooooo much green.

The carapace is castillian green, heavily drybrushed with naggaroth night, then highlighted with moot green:

At this point the models are about 90% done. All I have left is touch ups and gloss. I'll use 'ardcoat to put a shiny gloss layer on the carapace. Combined with the green/purple/bright green, it gives a very shiny, buglike look to the models that I really like. For the Zoanthropes, I'll also gloss the brains to try and give it an organic, exposed flesh look. I plan on not glossing the veins, in the hope that it gives a good contrast.

At this point it was Friday morning. I had the day off, a RTT on Saturday, and could have spent the day finishing the Zoanthropes.
Instead, I decided a Psychophage needed to happen. So it did.




At the point I stopped on Friday, I was about half way done with this model. She is a joy to assemble and to paint. She went together very smoothly, very few mold lines. Painting her has been so much fun. The interior of the mouth is the only really tricky part, as the face tentacles take up a lot of space and make it hard to reach the small teeth in the mouth.

Update Time!

I managed to get some painting and some games in between updates, with the slacking mostly coming on the posting side of things

Bugs are looking good. Like the brains. Keep an eye out for zombies...

First up, Rippers.




As I mentioned earlier, the Rippers are to help tell the Zoanthrope broods apart from each other. I was fairly happy with how this worked out.
They are fairly top heavy models, so I had to glue some pennies to the bases to help keep them from tipping over.



I wasn't able to find one set of arms. I grabbed some spare claws from a Tyrant Guard kit to replace the missing ones.
I ended up liking it so much that I almost went back and replaced the entire broods arms with Tyrant Guard arms. In the future I may end up doing just that, but for now I wanted to move forward with the project.

new arms........ vs. the classic ones....

I now have three full, completed broods of Zoanthropes, plus the DOOM of Ma'lanti, a spare zoey, and stumpy the mini zoey.




DOOOOOM!



Everybody Dance Now!



That is the Zoanthrope project completed. It was defiantly a lot of work. I'm overall pleased with how they came. I'm glad to be done painting brain bugs. I don't expect to need to do another one anytime soon, not unless I find one hiding in a corner.


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While I was working on the Zoanthropes I found a bit of time to clean up a Hive Tyrant.

This guy had been mostly painted at some point and was wandering around with no arms. No arms and no friends is less than ideal, even when you are a Hive Tyrant.



I wanted to be able to swap his guns, but I was less worried about his melee weapons. The lash whip and bone sword is the iconic Tyrant weapon, and I had an idea for a little buddy for him.

I added magnets to his lower arms and added magnets to the arm joints of a venom cannon and stranglethorn cannon. The magnet process is straightforward but fiddly. Next model that I do magnets from scratch with I'll put together a walkthrough of how I do them. The most annoying part is getting the two gun parts glued together. You have to clean off whatever paint is on the join, put the bits in place so that they are held by the magnets and supported with something, then glue them. Done correctly it is worth the work, but there is always one that doesn't want to set correctly, and you end up gluing your fingers to your fingers and somehow there is a magnet stuck to your eyebrow and you say screw it and go watch futurama instead. Annnnyway, moving on, cannons:



I didn't want him to be lonely, so I gave him a marine to be friends with.

I did the hole in the torso by drilling a hole in the torso with my dremel. Up close you can see that the inside of the torso is hollow. If I do an injury like that again, I'll pack the sides of the wound with putty and put some red and dark pink in there.

It isn't clear in the pictures, but the blob of orange next to his leg are flowers, with some blood splatter on them.

I tried to make the blood on the sword match the injuries: a splash on the edge from cutting his leg off, and blood on the tip from stabbing him.

I was very very proud of the idea of having a blip on the scanner. I spent way too much time trying to get it perfect.

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Digression: At some point I will need to figure out a name and fluff for the marines that I have littering my beautiful bug bases. So far what I have basically goes "We are marines. We got this tiger stripe thing going on. It is kinda sweet. Oh s**t, hormagants!" This is, I feel, a little sparse. I plan on eventually having Marines, Guard, and Sisters decorating various parts of my Tyranid and Genestealer Cult armies, with an overall woodland theme tying them together. The Guard will be a OD green and black scheme based on Vietnam era Air Cav units. I think having the Marines have a Vietnamese/East Asian theme will compliment that nicely. I need to do some thinking and some research on how best to execute that idea.

The long term goal is to have a painted and customized force of each of those factions, such that I could get some buddies and play three simultaneous full sized games with all of the models on the tables looking like they are fighting in the same campaign against each other. In order to do that I would need enough models to field a Genestealer cult army, a Marine army, an IG army, a Sisters army, and two Tyranid armies. Right now I have about two Tyranid armies and around 1/2 of a Genestealer cult army.

Next Project

The goal for this project is to get my Swarmlord and my Tyrant Guard up to standard. I have owned my Swarmlord since 5th Edition. He is a giant pile of sweet sweet pewter and learning and progress as a painter and modeler that I always find time to play. Right now he is in pretty good shape, but he took some damage being transported to a game. I also have seven of the older style Tyrant Guard. I'm not sure why I have seven of them. One of them is finecast that was in box when I dug him out. All I can think is that I got it cheap as part of some trade, then never did anything with him. The other six are in various stages of ready.

Four of the Tyrant Guard are at table top condition, and mostly need extra highlighting and basing. The bright green drybrush that I use as my final carapace layer is something I added relatively recently to my paint scheme, and the majority of my models don't have it. Adding it is straightforward: drybrush green, the re-gloss. One of them is fresh from box, another would be fresh from box if I knew where his arms were. The last one is mostly painted, but is missing an arm and a hand and is on an older, too small base. I have all the bits that came with the new Hive Guard/Tyrant Guard box, so I'll be able to snag some arms from there. I'll keep four of them with the scything talon arms. If I want to bump that up to a full six man squad, or run a second squad, it will be easy to get two more and paint them up. The last three I'll put twin swords on. Technically it is sword and whip, not twin swords, but I don't like the way the lash whips from this kit look. Having duel swords will make them match the Swarmlord, which will look nice on the table. The sword arms are right handed only, so I will have to take some whip arms, chop the whips off, and add swords so I have left handed swords.

The Tyrant Guard models fill up most of the base, so there is not a lot of room to do clever things with. The Swarmlord is positioned fairly forward on his base, again limiting the space for lots of extra stuff. Three of the talon Guard will be ran with the Tyrant that I just finished. They will get some marine bits, probably the arm and the weapon from the one on the Tyrants base. I recently picked up a fern basing kit from GW. I'll try that out on the Swarmlord and his Guard, see what I think of it. I may give him some Rippers, but I'm inclined to avoid making his base too busy.

Things to Do

Repair the tail and arm magnet on the Swarmlord.

Removing existing basing on the Swarmlord.

Build the left handed sword arms.

Clean, assemble and prime the Tyrant Guard.

Replace the lone small Tyrant Guard base.

Assemble and prime fern bits.

Build and prime marine bits.

Drink coffee

Clean up any damaged paint on the Swarmlord.

Paint two Tyrant Guard from scratch.

Clean up the other Tyrant Guard.

Paint the basing bits.

Drink coffee

My Swarmlord. His tail needs re-glued, and the magnet for the missing arm put back in. I have an extra, small spike on his head to better match the old art. I also used Tyrant bone swords for his upper arms. I like the large sword/small sword better than the four small swords the kit comes with.

Mostly complete Tyrant Guard. At one point I considered using the rounded edged bases. I have them on a number of my models. I'll likely replace both of the bases on the two on the right in order to have everyone on the same size and style of base.

Unassembled finecast models, proof that GW hates us. I don't like the way the tip of these whips look. If I ever use them I'll probably cut the tip off, or add some spikes, or something. The hands closely match the sword hands, as they are intended to be used together, so converting a whip into a left hand sword is straightforward.

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This is a bit of extra carapace that is intended for the newer version of the Tyrant Guard. It makes them look bulkier and more like a living wall. I didn't like how my arm conversions were going to leave my sword Guard lacking in shoulder plates, so I decided to trim this bit into one that would fit on the older style modelsGetting them right took some trimming and sanding. I want them to lie flush on the back plate of the model. The underside of the bit is intended for a completely different fitting. I had to take of a substantial amount of material.



The swords came together very smoothly, as did the rest of the cleaning and trimming. I decided to go with one bit of marine for each talon Guard.

Really like the tyrant guard arms on that classic zoanthrope + the massed zoanthropes on general. Would have loved that in 4th edition, warp blasts for the win!!