New Marine, New Tyranids!

I've spent the last couple weeks or so picking away at this Sternguard model, and now he's complete:

He needs a little bit of static grass behind that rock, but you get the point. This guy uses one of the white helmets I painted as an airbrush experiment several months ago. It looks nice on the model, alongside the white pad rims and gold aquila. He's clean and smooth, and I took some extra time to clean up lines and seams.
The only thing I don't like about him was the assembly of his head to the body. I painted the head separate from the body, pack, and bolter. I trimmed the neck before painting, and had done a test fit of the helmet into the Mk8 torso. Unfortunately, once all the parts were painted, they were a hair thicker in all dimensions. So when I tried to glue the head into the torso, there was some contact made between the helmet and the collar. It scraped the paint on all the contact points, and I about threw it across the room. I was able to repair the chips and scrapes, but the back of his helmet has some very small lumps and bumps from the repair work.
I'm now very leery of using the Mk8 torsos for the rest of the squad. I already have the second member of the squad assembled and primed, so I'll give it one more go, knowing that I have to be careful. But if I mess that one up, I may switch to non-Mk8 torsos and be happy with that.

I also continued working on my Hive Tyrant. I decided to lop off the talons from his feet. I then started resculpting texture on the bottom of his hooves.
The first step was resculpting the ball joint at the bottom of what I assume is his Achilles tendon

The hole in the first foot is actually an air bubble in the cast that I uncovered when I sliced off the talons. I'm going to use Brown Stuff to sculpt a pad under each hoof, similar to a horse shoe, and then more Green Stuff to give the area inside the "shoe" a fleshy texture. I stopped at the Achilles repair, because I wanted the GS to fully cure before moving on, as I didn't want to inadvertently touch the GS while working on the rest and ruin it. Patience!

While I waited for that to cure, I cleaned and assembled my very first Genestealer:

I have to say, assembling and working with Tyranids is half again as much fun as assembling and working with Marines. The swappable talons (this guy has Hormagaunt talons as his back arms), posing, etc is all so much fun. I still love my Marines, but assembling a Sternguard Marine is exactly the same as assembling a Tactical Marine or Assault Marine, just with different bitz attached.
This Genestealer needs a little gap filling around his neck and leg, but looks pretty neat overall.
I'd agonized over whether to jump right into sculpting Ymgarls or not, but decided to build at least five models with the basic Genestealer heads first. I need basic models to work with so I can hammer down my final color scheme, and waiting to sculpt fancy heads will add too much to the queue and further stall the project. Plus, I'll need basic Stealers as Troops far sooner than I'll need Ymgarls as Elites.

On Saturday I picked up some Liquitex artist ink, in a green-blue shade. My plan forward is to prime a few Genestealers white, airbrush my selected shade of green onto the fleshy parts, and then test out the effects of the ink on those areas. I'm pretty excited about the possibilities here!