My first attempts with greenstuff.

I bought some greenstuff months ago and have been far too nervous to actually try doing anything with it. I spent today constructing my Hive Tyrant and decided that such an imposing mini deserved a decent base so I tried to make a marine casualty using some bits and greenstuff.

It's not brilliant but I was happy enough to include it on the base. Once it's painted up it should look great.

The stuff is easy to work with, like stiff blutack, and it takes plenty of time to harden properly so if you're a bit clumsy or indecisive you have time to get it how you want it.

The Infestation Grows.

After a busy day filing and sniffing glue my growing Tyranid horde now includes 16 Hormagants and 8 Genestealers. The Genestealers are great models and well put together on the sprues.... the Hormagants however are the worst moulded minis I've ever built. Don't get me wrong, they look great when complete, but I spent so much time filing each part of each model to remove mould lines that it took me the entire day to put 24 'nids together.

Just 16 more Termagants, 3 Warriors and a Hive Tyrant to build and I'll have my first 1000 point army.

Ripper Swarms

Just to make sure my scheme works on minis other than Termagants I tried a couple of ripper swarms (I've fixed the blobby eye on the first pic now).

nom nom nom!

Time to get to work....

I have things to do.... nuff said!

:)

Struggling with basecoating.

My plans to ally with the great devourer took a bashing this weekend.... first when the £90 of minis I bought from GW failed to arrive in time for me to have a weekend sniffing plastic glue and putting together hordes of fiddly annoying Gaunts (but huge props to my parents in law who gave me the £90 for my B'day), and secondly when I tried to use the GW spraygun I bought midweek to basecoat my ‘nids.

Although the large part of my nid force did not arrive I still had the rest of the box of Termagants I used to practice my paint scheme on and I also had a box of Gargoyles which have been waiting to be built since before the codex came out - they just looked so cool in the shop and are probably entirely responsible for the fact that the first 1000 point army I have will now be ‘nids not wolves. I figured in preparation for the big boxes of sprues, which I hope will arrive tomorrow, I'd build the rest of the Termagants and the Gargoyles and practice basing with the spraygun.

The Gargoyles were fiddlier to build than I expected and it took me all of Saturday afternoon to build 4 Termagants and 10 Gargoyles (I almost missed picking the wife up from work as 4 hours slipped by too easily!). I also put together two bases of rippers from the Gaunts box - I had some spare bases and thought 7 looked too crowded on a base (I know that's how they're supposed to look and I intend to used the FW rippers for my army in the end as those just look awesome but for now I just wanted some bases I could paint easily and playtest with).

Suffice it to say the spraygun experiment didn’t work (I’ll explain why in my next post) so I had to basecoat my Termagants by hand but they are now all done and I’ll soon have my first ‘nids unit complete. The reason for the rainbow colours in the pic is that I wanted to use my ‘test models’ but didn’t want to strip them or lose any detail by painting over the existing layer. Once I have 30 termagants the few fruity ones will blend into the background and I need all the biomass I can recover.

Expect another update soon....

My new tyranid paint scheme.

So after a weekend of experimenting (and the best part of a box of termagants) I've finally found a tyranid paint scheme I'm happy with and can turn out in a decent amount of time. In the next few weeks I'll be buying and building as many 'nids as I can afford. The final model has almost ended up as Hive Fleet Kraken, a fact which I only realised after I finished it.

I've noticed that my fine brush skills are significantly better than they were when I started my Wolves a few months ago; they're hardly groundbreaking but a few months ago I wouldn't have been able to do the eye on the fleshborer. To celebrate my 'nid scheme and reward myself for continual improvement I'm ordering a new set of Army Painter brushes (still using the same two old GW brushes I bought back in october to do all the painting on this site and they are starting to show the strain).

I'll continue to post my ongoing Tyranid force as it begins to grow.