Incoming: Tyranids

Greetings,

I was considering to start a new army for a while now and as I have two more or less shooty armies with Marines and Tau I wanted an army for close combat. My initial thoughts went in the direction of Khorne Daemons with the possibility to add World Eater Marines later for a mixed chaos army. But that would mean to paint marines again and after having painted about 6000 points worth of loyalist marines I wasn't too eager about that. And a not too unimportant point was to start a more organic army with some kind of monstrous creatures (daemons would fit those criteria as well) where I could use techniques as washing and dry brushing to get some nice results quickly. To make long things short (actually I am thinking about that since early summer) I decided to start Tyranids. And as the rumours got more solid that the bugs would get a new codex in 2010 I was definetely signed in.
So lately I got myself the last battle force at my FLGS and the last box of gaunts on top of it. And so after the tournament was over I started painting. But oh my, what colour scheme would be nice? After a long process of trying different things with old gaunts Clausewitz left at my site years ago and playing around with the army painter in DoW II, I decided to do something similar to the colouration done in Imperial Army IV: The Anphelion Project. It's a grey-ish, boney body with green or brown carapace.  So take a look at my version of it:

Hormagaunts

Warriors

Carnifex

The "swarm"

As you can see I have nothing shooty yet. And that's the way I want to go, a close combat heavy army with lots of bugs. As I want to play a horde-style army, I had to find a colour scheme which is easy and quick to paint. The base colour is bleached bone, the carapax is painted with knarloc green. Then everything gets a wash with thinned devlan mud, then again bleached bone dry-brushed over the body. The red edges are done with terracotta. Finally the carapax gets a coat of gloss varnish. I think they get a more organic feeling that way. That's it for the little critters, the bigger bugs get a bit more attention and so the green parts get more washing steps with ogryn flesh/devlan mud mix and thraka green. And I highlighted the terracotta parts with uneven brush strokes of blood red.

So that's it for the moment. Left on the painting table are 8 gaunts with fleshborers and 4 genestealers (assembled), 8 gaunts of both kinds and the remaining 4 stealers left in the box. After those are done, I think it's time for a hive tyrant and some tyrant guards. And I am really curious on the new plastic raveners and gargoyles.