Tyranid Warriors

Everything I paint recently has been speed painted, or as speedy as I can do it and still feel satisfied with the result. Even so my level of speed painting has reached a new level of lazyness.

I have been enmassing Tyranid Warriors for some time now, not really on purpose, it is just something which has happened kind of by itself. At some point I bought the Advanced Space Crusade game and recently I acquired the Tyranid Attack game.

I have no idea how many complete plastic Tyranid Warriors I have now, but the collection is ranging from mint on sprue to painted with a stick and broken into bits and pieces.

I decided to start out salvageing what I could from the painted and broken models I had and let the mint models wait for later. So if I eventually decide to sell off some of them it will be easier to get rid of those in good mint condition.

Tyranid Warriors on board their mothership.

These three are the first to have emmerged from the stripping jar, having broken limbs and weapons glued back together and get a new paintjob.

As you can see they have been given a very fast and basic paintjob and to elaborate on the lazy speed paint I gave them, these models only have five colours on them. A basecoat of red and bone, washed with a brown wash and then highlighted with a brighter red and the bone. The fifth colour is a light pink for the eyes.

Backsides.

To be honest, I never really liked these models, I think they are terrible plastic crap, which is why I gave them such a fast and sloppy paintjob. But I think it works out and I am happy to field these as playing pieces in upcoming games of Advanced Space Crusade or Tyranid Attack.

I will probably paint the next batch in some different colours for a bit variation, after all they were kind of fun to paint.

Piscean Warriors and More Tyranids

Finally I finished my second Piscean Warrior and got some photos taken of them both. At the same time I thought I would show a bit more of my growing Tyranid forces.

I was so lucky to get my hands on a copy of the original Piscean Warrior and the one sculpted by Obscure Creator over at the Oldhammer Forum. I think they look pretty good together and even though the new one is not a dublicate in style they still have the same size and bulk, so now I just wait for a couple more sculpts to complete a unit.

Alien species face off in a desert deathworld.

I also added eight more Hunter-Slayers to my pack of Tyranids. This brings me to a total of 18. To be honest, I have no idea if I will ever field that many, but it just looks impressive with a horde of these and whenever I see any cheap I can't stop buying them.

The eight new ones.

My combined Tyranid forces so far.

Next up is a Dominator to lead the forces. I also have a load of Genestealers, of course, but I really feel like they should stick to Space Hulk or their Genestealer Cult for now. But maybe they will join up with the Tyranid forces in the future.

Hunter-Slayer, Dominator and Zoat.

Tyranid Zoats

So it was time to paint me some Zoats... What can I say about the Zoats? I guess they are kind of a strange race, but I guess most of the Rogue Trader stuff is kind of strange, so they fit in fine with the setting. I have been wanting some Zoats for some time and this year I decided to do something about it and so I managed to get 5 Zoats fairly cheap from Ebay.

In the Rogue Trader days the Zoats were a Tyranid slave race created for war. Apparently they usually would roam around in groups of 4 sporting weapons like bolters and heavy bolters. But since they were allowed same equipment and weapons as Tyranids, they could also wear power armour, use gravitons, conversion beamers or whatever stuff you can think of from the Rogue Trader days.

When GW made some Zoat models I guess Tyranids were already becoming something else and so the models were equipped with more bio engineered weapons, but the fleshborers still kind of looked like bolters, the missile launcher looked pretty funky and the leader was equipped with power glove and a flamer which looked like a mix of the fleshborers and an imperial flamer.

My combined Tyranid forces so far!

So when I painted my Zoats I decided to give them a look of semi bio enginered and tech equipment. It will not really work perfect with the never Tyranid background, but I think it will work fine with Rogue Trader weirdness and still be fine with my Hunter-Slayers. So the weapons was painted red, to look semi organic and tie the Zoats in with my Hunter-Slayers and I still decided to paint some metal parts on the flamer, missile launcher, power glove and armour. I also decided to do the hazard stripes on the flamer, it might be kind of silly, but I think it ended up looking good and when the organic weapons already looked a bit like bolters and flamers then why wouldn't they also mimic the hazard stripes?

Ready to go to war.

I am not planning to do a complete Tyranid force for later 40K gaming, but I have acquired 8 more Hunter-Slayers which I will paint and I have a bunch of the old plastic Tyranid Warriors, which I will probably paint at some point, so I guess that some day I might have enough Tyranids for more than just small skirmish games.

I don't really count the Genestealers as part of the Tyranid army, but if needed I have 24 painted Genestealers and a Patriarch, so they could reinforce an army too. So that almost concludes my Tyranid adentures...

I just got one more thing to hunt down! I would REALLY like to have the Proto Tyranid to lead my forces, but so far I have not managed to get one.

What a beast!

Space Hulk and the Genestealer Cult

Space Hulk was one of the first Games Workshop games I ever came in contact with and I loved it right away. I was not very old but somehow I managed to save up enough money to buy myself a copy. It is one of those games which again and again gets taken out from the shelves and dusted off.

A couple of years ago I decided to try and lure my wife to play some missions with me and she agreed. But only if I painted the miniatures first. This sounded reasonable I thought and since I was collecting both a Blood Angels army and a Genestealer Cult I could find use for the miniatures in 40K gaming too.

It did not take me long to paint up the first Genestealer Brood (12 miniatures) and one squad of Blood Angel Terminators and then we could play the first couple of missions...

But then the Space Hulk project kind of stagnated and I was probably caught up in all sorts of other miniatures buisness... I never completely forgot about the Genestealers and Genestealer Cult project and some how, no matter what else we game, we always end back in the 40K universe...

So now I finally finished the painting of 12 more genestealers and somewhere along the way I also painted up a Genestealer Patriarch...

I have Genestealer Cult Brood Brothers on my painting table and one more Terminator squad, so hopefully I will have a 40K Genestealer Cult at some point and painted Terminator models enough for further Space Hulk gaming.

A Few Painted Miniatures

I haven't really finished any larger group of miniatures lately, but it doesn't mean that I haven't done anything. I have been painting a few random models, painting on still unfinished and ongoing projects (Genestealer Cult, Retained Knights, Space Marines and such), cleaning up and preparing models, stripping second hand models and all such things.

But here is a few of the models I finished recently...

Angry dude and some Hunter-Slayers.

I finished the last two of my Hunter-Slayers, this time trying to give the tubes a green colour, to add a little more variety to their colour scheme. I think it works out quite well, but I don't know if I will repaint the already painted ones... Time will tell I guess.

The big guy is a Lab Mutant from Reaper Miniatures. I bought him really cheap on ebay last year sometime. I was buying something else from the seller and browsed his other auctions and I got tempted by this guy, especially since no one else was bidding on him.

The Hunter-Slayers will gang up with my other eight and the Lab Mutant will probably be used in Post Apocalyptse games or as a Super Villain in modern Super Hero games.