The Horror in the Dark

My first set of five Genestealers is complete! Here's proof:

 

 

Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with these guys. They're not as intensively blended as my Hive Tyrant, and the lack of armor plates makes them much more monochrome. One thing I do not like about them is the bases. The sand and such is good, but in order to use all parts of a given model and eat up some slotted bases, I cut the slotta tabs off of the models, then glued them into the bases. I left the little decorative pieces on the bases. Each one includes a little rock and some sort of Nid-flesh spike or growth. At first I thought they'd look neat, but after I painted them up to match the green I use, they looked like crap. For the next batch, I'm just going to trim those off and throw them in the bitz bin.

You'll also notice that all of the models (except one, see below) use Hormagaunt talons instead of the humanoid secondary claws Genestealers normally use. Something about those hands bothers me, so I decided not to use any. But because I only had four spare sets of Hormagaunt talons, I needed another set of arms. I blatantly stole an idea I saw over at Warpshadow. I cut the hands off the arms and attached Daemonette claws in their place. I think they turned out pretty well.

Genestealers are my favorite Tyranid unit and model, so I decided to make up another batch of five to bring this to a respectable brood size while also giving me the option of a super tiny playable force when combined with my Tyrant. The next batch will also have one model with Daemonette claws, as well as one of the biomorph heads (the toxin sac head aka "Ballchinian"). I ran out of the normal heads, and didn't feel like waiting to trade away the biomorph heads I do have for plain ones. Before the new codex dropped, I had planned to turn all of the old implant attack heads into Ymgarls with custom-made Green Stuff tendrils (another idea blatantly stolen from Warpshadow). I'll probably still do that at some point, but the strong incentive isn't there any more. Instead of full broods, you'll see one-offs here and there.

I'm also still slowly picking away at my drop pod. I put the first few licks of paint on the fin assembly last night, so I'm inching forward on the Marine front.

 

Picture time!

As I promised, here are some pics I took over the course of a couple projects, but that never panned out into anything resembling the tutorials I wanted them to.

First up is a series of WIP shots of my Hive Tyrant's base.

This one is the base with the materials glued down. It's gravel and washdown material from the end of my driveway, resin tree stumps and a doric column chunk from Secret Weapon, and some Greenstuff mushrooms.

Then the same base primed white (very exciting). It took quite a few spritzes from the can at various angles to get all the rocks covered and gaps primed.

After that it was a few coats of Reaper MSP Stained Ivory on the dirt and exposed wood. When that was dry, it got a thinned wash of Gryphonne Sepia on the ground and Thraka Green on the wood. I wanted the wood to look soggy and decayed, and it was the one thing i feel I didn't pull off well. I was generally unhappy with the end result of the stumps, which you'll see in a future post.

I wanted some shadows and a moist soil look around the stumps, so I went with Devlan Mud wash around them. I then added a few more areas of Devlan, Ogryn Flesh, Leviathan Purple, and even a few dots of Thraka Green. I mostly concentrated on the areas where grass and reeds would be, figuring they'd retain and grow in the moist areas.

This final shot shows where I started basecoating the stone grey, and added some purple and brown washes to the stump bark.

And that's where I stopped taking pictures because I was short on time.

I grabbed these two shots of my WIP Devastator Sergeant in order to start a tutorial on how to shade red. Here's the sergeant with a basecoat of red on his helmet:

 

And then again after washing the red with Thraka Green, which is the proper color for shading red. I abandoned this tutorial because I was painting my ass off for the Standish Standoff.

 



Then I have this shot of my drop pod being assembled, using slide clamps to hold the fins in place while glue cures. I was going to do a whole article on these and other clamps, but I assemble models far too slowly for that.

 And finally, a shot of one of my Genestealers after I had put a Sepia wash on the basecoated talons. The green skin is complete in this shot.

So, that is make-up picture day. I'll have some more shots of the finished Tyrant and Genestealers next time.