Tyranids, New School Style!

 I made reference to this way back in my entry called "Tyranids, Both Old and New" - I was going to paint up one of the Genestealers from Games Workshop's old Battle for Macragge set for a painting competition. Well, I managed to squeeze in some time while prepping a few figures and waiting for primer to dry, and cranked this guy out in about four hours spread out between last Monday night and Tuesday:

 I was aiming to paint him up something along the lines of the color scheme on the cover of the recently-released GW Codex: Tyranids, but the red turned out extremely pink and the bluish-purple turned out pale blue when highlighted initially (I should've known, given the colors I was using). I just ran with it...

 After I put the primary color down for the skin areas I realized that desaturating the chitin colors by adding grey might help - so I ended up giving the whole figure a wash of the skin shade color. After building up and shading the blue-purple I went back and added in Khaki for highlights on the red and blue instead of anything yellowish or white, which worked moderately well. It's still a funky color scheme and I wasn't wanting to waste time by drybrushing thinned Khaki by itself after the fact to get it a bit closer to the Codex: Tyranids cover art, so again I just ran with it... It'll probably be a while before I get around to vague plans to convert up a Tervigon and a modified Brood Lord, and then crank out a whole bunch of 'Nids, but I think I'll stick with this scheme. It's not amazingly difficult and could be painted assembly-line style, which is what I was aiming for with this guy to begin with - more of a "high end tabletop standard."


 I'd also like to add that Liquitex Flow Aid is the whip - I tried it out with this guy after buying some of the stuff a few weeks back. The top of the base was painted with nothing more than a highlight color and two shade colors thinned down with my "new and improved" wash thinning mixture. I think it's a keeper!

 Any comments or suggestions? I wasn't aiming for anything overly fancy here, but I liked the color scheme on the cover of the newest Codex: Tyranids. With the exception of the color transition across the chitin areas, everything else was painted more or less using thick washes and then highlighted (the chitin was done the same way, only I started with red across the board and then went back across with progressively darker blues before highlighting).

Tyranids, Old School Style!

 Frankly, I'm shocked I never got off my butt and wrote up a tutorial for this guy, since I essentially had the makings of one in a forum thread I started for him for a Relicnews Painting & Modeling Forum competition - but here's some stuff on a way, way "old school" Genestealer Patriarch I painted in 2007. After some additional work on him following the Relicnews P&M Forum competition, he was one of the figures I took to my first-ever Golden Demon Competition and he was fairly well received - I ended up getting a lot of nice compliments. I seem to recall being told he was an "Honorable Mention" along with all my other entries, but I'll admit I was a little stunned at the time by news that my Lord of the Rings entry had apparently won Silver - I had just come down to the main hall after attending a very well-presented painting seminar by Jérémie Bonamant-Teboul, and someone else from the West Oaks Hobby Center group I rode with to Chicago came up and told me about my Gandalf LotR entry.

 I was more or less like a deer caught in the headlights from about that point until the bus ride back towards home. My Patriarch did actually make First Cut but never got pictures taken of him by GW staff as far as I know, and likewise never made it onto the US GW website or into the White Dwarf magazine issue later that year. While seeing this guy in print would've been nice, I do realize it's a very old, very ugly figure (which I personally think is part of the charm) and there's also the fact that the Brood Lord had just come out in the Tyranid Codex released that year - they essentially fulfill a similar role in the "fluff," and of course Games Workshop would choose to play up a newly-released figure with new rules as opposed to a pure lead casting out-of-production relic from the late 80's.


Without further ado, here's something like a work-in-progress thread but without all the excess verbiage:

 

 

Here's the final version of my Genestealer Patriarch that ended up going to the 2007 Chicago Golden Demon Competition:

And for anyone who's curious, here's most of the color recipes I used in painting him up:

Patriarch Skin:

• Basecoat 2:1:1 Vallejo Model Color Deck Tan/Games Workshop Skull White/Games Workshop Purple Ink
• Layer 4:2:1 Deck Tan/Skull White/Purple Ink
• Layer 2:1 Deck Tan/Skull White +1 drop Purple Ink @ 1:10 ink/thinner consistency
• Layer 2:2 Deck Tan/Skull White + 1 drop Purple Ink @ 1:10 ink/thinner concentration
• Wash with 1:1 GW Codex Grey/VMC Russian Uniform @ 1:20 paint/thinner consistency
• Wash with 1:20 Vallejo Game Color Hexed Lichen @ 1:20 paint/thinner consistency
• Highlight 2:2 Deck Tan/Skull White + 1 drop Hexed Lichen @ 1:10 paint/thinner consistency
• Add + 1 drop of VMC White to above mixture and highlight
• Extreme highlight with 2 drops VMC White + 1 drop Hexed Lichen at 1:10 paint/thinner consistency

Carapace:

• Basecoat 2:2:1 GW Black/VGC Hexed Lichen/GW Ultramarine Blue
• Layer 2:1:1 Ultramarine Blue/Black/Hexed Lichen
• Layer 2:1 Ultramarine Blue/Hexed Lichen
• Add + 2 drops of Deck Tan to above mixture and highlight carapace edges
• Highlight edges 1:2 Ultramarine Blue/Deck Tan
• Add + 2 drops of VMC White to above mixture and extreme highlight carapace edges
• Line in between carapace patterning with 2:1:1 Chaos Black/Ultramarine Blue/Hexed Lichen at 1:20 paint/thinner consistency
• Repeat lining-in of extreme shaded areas with above mixture

Claws:

• Basecoat with 1:1 GW Red Gore/Chaos Black
• Paint initial striations with +1 drop of VMC Buff/Russian Uniform @ 1/10 paint//thinner consistency to above mixture
• Layer additional striated highlights with + 1 drop of Deck Tan to the above mixture

Crystals:

• Basecoat crystal sides with 1:1 GW Dark Angels Green/thinner
• Layer side opposite light source with + 6 drops of GW Striking Scorpion Green added to above mixture
• Add + 1 drop DA Green to above mixture and layer next adjacent crystal face
• Add + 1 drop of DA Green to above mixture and layer opposite adjacent crystal face
• Repeat above steps with + 1 drop of DA Green added until all crystal faces are painted
• Darken interior of crystal faces depending on appearance with glaze of GW Green Ink at 1:20 ink/thinner consistency
• Extreme highlight crystal edges with 3:1:10 DA Green/Green Ink/thinner

Tyranids, Both Old and New

 Ron from ++From the Warp++ recently asked for people to forward entries related to Tyranids for an upcoming collaborative post from the community (which I'll link to when it happens - he's dependable like that). I realized that I don't really have a lot of older material on my site that I refer to, or have so much as linked to since changing the news item entry format of my painting website from old-fashioned manual HTML editing of every single update to a newer, fancier layout using a Blogger blog as the "centerpiece."

 A short while after I got back into miniature painting again as a hobby, Games Workshop released their Battle for Macragge set, with a force of Space Marines and an opposing force of Tyranids (along with some excellent scenery and introductory rules for playing 4th Edition 40K so straightforward that even I could follow along - it's been a year or two now, but I went back and got everything out and actually played through the first few missions with our then-4-year-old daughter, even). At the time, I was considering the Tyranids as a choice of army to play the game with regularly - in hindsight, it's probably just as well I settled on something else, because if I had stuck with them and continued painting them in the style and color scheme I had chosen, I probably would've given up on army painting in no time flat. As it is, I'm still working on getting 500 points of something finished and playable, but I've done a lot of display-quality painting since that time and still haven't been scared away from the game.

 What I did do, though, was write up a number of tutorials as I worked my way through some of the Battle for Macragge figures. They're still valid and linked to on my Tutorials page, even though I've moved on quite a bit painting-wise since then. I wrote one up for both a Tyranid Infestation Marker and an Exploding Spore Mine, and even went so far as to try out a few (minorly) different color schemes for the exposed fleshy areas:

 I'd actually been thinking about revising my old Tyranid color scheme recently, even before Ron put out a request. After sorting through my bitz collection for the sake of gathering up parts to use for my Chaos Warband, I found that other than the Tyranid pieces that came with the Macragge set, I actually have enough to assemble what appears to be one of the larger Monstrous Creatures (a Warrior, maybe?) and then there's a metal Brood Lord someone gave me! The recent White Dwarf cover was the clincher, though (or should I say "the artwork for the new Tyranid Codex"?) in that it's got everything I had ever originally envisaged for a unique flesh tone-based color scheme but didn't have the experience to paint back in '05. Pallid veiny flesh, mottled carapace in a mixture of bruise-like colors, and one of my favorite contrast colors: glowing, sickly yellow-green; What's not to like?

 I'm going to take a stab at speed painting a "new and improved" 'Nid color scheme for an in-progress painting competition over on the RelicNews Painting & Modeling Forum with an airbrush that's been gathering dust in our basement since my birthday in August. I've never used an airbrush before, but ideally I'll end up with this skin color...

 

 ...looking something like this skin color by the competition due date:

 

Here's hoping!