Today, i'm going to show you my painting process - how to paint tyranids without being able to paint...
But First, I've copied the small section from my Lucky88th blog showing the issues with the model.
I've sculpted a tongue for him, the mouth was a bit of a dodgy sculpt, and i didn't fancy the "Alien" tongue supplied, i figured something more in keeping with the other monsters would be more fitting.
I can't think what to do about the base. as far as i can remember, hive tyrants are normally on 60mm bases, but the base on this monster is already wider than that, so i could grind the resin base to 60mm, and build up a 60mm base to the same height with greenstuff, or make a nice wooden plinth stylebase and just make it 75mm the same width as the resin piece, or simply leave him as he is.
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Okay, onto the painting:
Firstly, I undercoat the model with Chaos black spray, making sure to spray in stages from different anlges to get into all the hard to reach areas, allowing it to dry each time.
Then, using a fairly large brush, I brush on a coat of Khemri Brown foundation, this paint is thick, sandy, and dries quickly, so speed is the key to push the paint around until it merely coats the model and doesnt clog up the details.
Then I paint the "skin" sections (everything apart from the armour) in Bleached Bone. I have to do this twice to get a nice smooth coverage.
this stage doesnt have to be neat, I tend to get it on the armour edges - making sure I fill all the details nicely.
Apologies here, I got a step ahead of myself. You can see where I've carefully applied Camo Green to the shoulder plate and where I've used Thraka Green to coat the head plates and leg/arm plates (after their coat of Camo Green had dried).
Coat all the armour plates in thraka green once the camo green is dry.With the armour now done, you can tidy up the edges of the Skin with bleached bone, covering areas where you may have accidentally splodged some thraka green wash, or the wash may have run a little too far from the armour.
on this particular model, I tidied up the areas where the skin looked as if it was attached to the armour plates, knowing that this would eventually be washed brown making the joins "seamless"
Then I coated the large scythe blades with Skull White, using a large brush and switching to a small brush to do the same with all the smaller claws.
Again I jumped ahead of myself, painting the tongue in Elf flesh, then once dry, washing it with Baal Red.
Many stages happened here (I was on a roll)Firstly, the scythe blades were washed with Gryphonne Sepia, with the aim of getting the wash to stay at the wider part of the scythe, and getting lighter towards the tips.
Now to wash the main body.
Washes tend to dry fairly quickly, so it's a good idea to split up larger models into small sections.
Using Devlan Mud, I washed the arms first, starting where the arm meets the scythe and stopping at the ball joint at the body. After the arms I did the legs, then the tail and lower body, then the upper body, then the head. You have to be carefull not to go too far onto the armour, the scythes, or the toungue, but you should meet them to give a nice dark border (the secret of this wash is to hide where one colour ends and another begins)
I then used skull white on any claws I had missed- the toes and the ones on the "cheeks" and carefully covering the teeth - then washed them in Gryphonne Sepia.Using the Baal Red wash, I carefully filled the details in on the arms and legs, making the piping stand out.
So here he is, the Hive Tyrant of my "no guns" Tyranid army. Which incidentally I'll be using for the first time this weekend, John P has kindly offered me access to his VAST array of tyranid models to use as count as to fill out mine to 2000points.
Hope you enjoyed this run through of how I quickly achieve a detailed look with actually very little effort, no dry brushing, or layering of different paints, just a simple "painting by numbers" with the basic paints and complimentary washes to give the effect of depth and details.
Cheers, TSINI
