Quarterdime wrote:
Base coat skin tone, then paint chitin, give model wash, highlight chitin, pick out details.

Be mindful not to exaggerate the highlights. It's a pitfall that I see a lot of tyranid players fall into.

 xttz wrote:
Just before the last codex I went through and decided to get all my Nids up to the same standard. With 180 guants, 50 Genestealers and 30 Gargoyles that was gonna take a little while...

So I cut out the usual shading for the flesh and chitin parts, and went with a more basic scheme:

Black primer (left as the primary colour on the flesh parts)

Mephiston red on chitin

A light blue layer with a dark blue wash for the tongues + weapons (this is really noticable and effective on Devourers).

White for the teeth (doesn't take as long as you think, and quickly adds contrast to the model)

Based with Agrellan Earth, which produces a nice effect in one coat. The base rim was either left black or done in brown to help separate units on the table.

With small, swarmy models, it's generally more noticeable to have 3-4 colours than have 1-2 colours that are properly shaded.

For comparison, on my larger Nids (Warriors and bigger), I normally follow these steps for the black flesh parts:

Black primer

Heavy longbeard grey drybrush

Nuln oil shade

Very light longbeard grey drybrush for final highlights

And these for the chitin:

Mephiston red

Evil Sunz red in 2-3 layers

Shading between armour sections in black and/or nuln oil

 Unyielding Hunger wrote:
Just as another example, here is my process for painting.

Step 1: Prime on Sprue (afterwards, just clip them off. The parts that aren't primed wont matter much, since they usually go in places that wont be seen.)

Step 2: Piece by piece, paint in soft tissue. (I find it easy to get in the soft tissue, then just paint onward from there.)

Step 3: Paint hard carapace. (Since this is 90% of the model, I find it easy just to get it over with.)

Step 4: Paint chitin, claws, and weaponry. (These are the more easily worn areas of the model, so I wind up painting them last)

Step 5: Details. (Don't forget the details!)

Step 6: Touch up as needed. (Everyone makes mistakes, take this time to fix them.)

Step 7: Assemble and touch up again as needed. (Trust me, everyone winds up with a few scratches, etc, when they wind up putting it together, somehow)

Step 8: Clear coat: (My bases are done long before the model ever is, so after you carefully get it positioned, go ahead and give it a coat so it stays the way you want it forever. Depending on how you like it, a heavy coat can give it that nice shiny/slime look.)

After all that, I can cheerfully crank out a single termagant in roughly 4 hours.

rigeld2 wrote:
For gants I:

Cut from sprue. Clean mold lines. Assemble.
Use alligator clips and cake-pop sticks to hold gants at varying heights.
Prime.
Basecoat (I use a spray paint http://www.krylon.com/products/fluorescent-paint/ )
Brush paint chitin and carapace
Paint fleshy bits
Paint on a "dip"
Attach to base.
Flock base.

 Unyielding Hunger wrote:

Hehehe...you think I have finished models. Yea.. for some strange reason, I wind up with about 10% finished product, and the other 90% wind up in darn near eternal reconstruction. The people in my gaming circle are used to me fielding a unit one day, and the empty base it used to sit on the next because I noticed some small flaw and my CDO kicked in and I had to go fix it. But, here is a prime example of my work.



Even as I look at this picture, I still see flaws that I have to triple check to make sure I covered...