Picture Friday: I'm a Zebra?

I sat down last evening, determined to make visible progress on the Hive Tyrant. In the last couple weeks, I was content to slap a single coat of thinned paint on the carapace per night and call it good. Not so last evening. I wanted visible results!

So, i plonked down and spent an hour and a half putting two coats of a 2:1 mix of Faded Khaki and Stained Ivory as my first "streak layer." I have to interject here and say "thank goodness I blogged this process before," because I'd forgotten at what point I'd started streak colors on the claws! I was able to go back in blog posts and find where I'd talked about it. I keep a paint recipe book, but I'd forgotten to annotate where I switched from full carapace work to streaking.

Here's the results:

 

 

One of the things I struggled with was how much of each plate to apply streaking to. GW does only a little on the very edges. I've seen others who streak the whole thing. I decided to go for about a 70% coverage, working downward. The plates on his talons are actually a little higher percentage, but I felt less might be better on these large plates in order to still allow you to see the base color.

I think it's a good start, though there are some too-thick strokes in certain spots. Thankfully, the technique is forgiving in the early stages. Those overlarge strokes will be broken up by the next layers of color, which get progressively thinner and shorter.

I'm hoping to have plenty of time at night for the next three days to keep pushing forward on this guy. I think once I get past the carapace, things will absolutely fly by, as all I'll have left are the claws/hooves, purple flesh, and then cleanup. I have some spots of brown on the green I need to fix. Then comes basing, which I'm dreading. I know what I want it to look like, but can't see in my mind how I'm going to pull it off.

I think I spotted a cork bottle of wine in the grocery bag yesterday, so hopefully my fifth Genestealer will have something to stand on soon. I can't decide how to paint them, though. There are two main schools of Genestealer painting, it seems. One paints the core of the body in the army's carapace armor color, and the other paints it int he flesh color, with almost no armor plating color at all. You either end up with a monochrome Genestealer like GW's current website examples, or two-tone Genestealers like GW uses for the Space Hulk painted examples or the third edition box.

I like the two-tone look because it's more interesting from a visual standpoint. But, I dislike it for two reasons: it lacks continuity with the rest of the army and it takes longer to paint.

Every other Nid model in the range has clear delineations between flesh and chitin. Genestealers do not. The only plating on them is on some of the heads. To me, painting non-plated parts of a Genestealer the same color as the plated parts of other models is a little jarring.

Of course, the monochrome version is a little boring, as they all just blend into one mass. It is MUCH quicker and simpler to paint, though. In the end, I think it's all about what you can pull of with either technique. My leaning is towards monochrome, as there's no armor on them (because the scuttle around in crawlspaces and air ducts), and I think I might be able to make them pop with the small spots of purple and ivory on flesh and talons.

On the Marine front, still no painting progress. That poor Sternguard trooper is just sitting and waiting. I will have to finish him and his last compatriot before I move on to anything else. This new book might push me toward drop pods, instead of bikes, but we'll see.