Finished Tyrgon With Ruined Ultra Marines Rhino

I just finished the Tyrgon! I cleaned up the bone, and made some ruined Ultra Marines rhino parts to add to the base. I think the blue does a lot to bring out the orange, purple and green of the Tyrgon itself. I had loads of fun painting this guy, and hope the store lets be keep the thing once their competition is over. I think the GW Manager has lit a fire beneath me now to paint up some Tyrannids! I especially love painting ruined ultra marines stuff. This army would give me the opportunity to paint all kinds of damaged ultra stuff, but without having to start an Ultra Marines Army.

I think I must dust the base with some forge world powders before I take it to the store. A miniature is never done!

A few hints for this model.

1) do not glue it to the base before the base is painted and done. I got this one glued down, and there were a lot of really difficult places to reach.

2) Paint the base coat and all of the scales before glueing it together! I could have produced a much cleaner model if I did not have to content with the finished piece rather than the individual segments.

3) Buy one! This things is just loads of fun to paint.

trygon Part 3

At this point I have dry brushed the shell with a deheneb stone/purple to pull out the edges and cover the areas of purple wash that sat above the joints. I also re-washed the gryphonne sepia into the areas that were missing it from the first go around, and painted in the little orange tail things. I plan to clean up the bone areas to remove areas where washes pooled. I am not sure if I should dry brush the body with a yellow/green mixture to bring out the details, or just leave is a little spotted from the wash. I would like to get this done by this afternoon so I can return it to the store, but that means I have to skimp on the basing. I've got some rhino hatches that could be weathered and placed in the center of the tail. That would bring some sharp metallic into the mix which would provide a nice contrast...so which chapter should be painted on the the ruined vehicle door? I suppose it should be ultra marines, but I could put a wolves symbol on the base in order to not visually pull away from the green.

Trygon Primed!

In a fit of awesomeness, the local GW Tzar offered to let me paint the store model. This thing is absolutely wicked cool. I plan on using the light green method used on my gene stealer for the soft fleshy parts, and some contrasting color for the bone plates. I was thinking of dark brown, with yellow streaks or a muddy purple with yellow streaks. Orange is kind of appealing to me as well. I may try to Iron Man this tonight and tomorrow so I can take it back to the store. It really comes down to how fast washes dry, and how involved the base should be. I received the model built, but, I think I need to sculpt some undulations onto the base, add reeds, maybe an impaled guards man, or perhaps ruined weathered tank bits. I am really looking forward to this!

Genestealer Step By Step

So a while back I won a painting competition with a genestealer. I have put off writing the step by step until now. Rather than follow my original steps I decided to try the process using only water, white primer, and gw paints. The missing ingredient in this is Tamiya X-20A acrylic paint thinner. The process definitely works better with paint thinner if you have it but it still does ok with water. The key thing with this whole process is very thinned paints, followed by targeted washes.

1. Prime White
2. Mix Scorpion Green with a lot of water. It should be soupy and naturally shade the mini. It is best made using a few drops of paint thinner rather than water, but I used water here. Whatever you do, do not use an airbrush for this step. The goal is to not have any even dispersal of paint!
3. Paint the whole mini except claws.
4. Wash the full mini with Gryphonne Sepia. The key here is to add a little thinner so the surface tension of the wash is broken. Again I used water here to see what would happen.
5. Once that was is essentially dry, use washes of Levian purple around the base of each claw. I also added some wash to the face detail on the mini, and a few random spots. The purple is key because it really pulls out the detail. I would not put too much on though.
6. Dry brush the whole miniature with some light color. I used bleached bone on one of these, and will probably use the deheneb stone foundation paint on a different on. The goal here is to hit the top of the head, the hands, and boney protrusions. Be careful not to add too much.
7. Paint the tongue red
8. Make a bleached bone wash and hit the tips of the claws and hooves. Finish this by adding some white to the wash to highlight just the tips.
9. rinse and repeat. I like to vary the colors just a bit from model to model so the bugs do not look like carbon copies of each other.

These take me almost no time at all to paint. I basically did them interspersed while doing other tasks. A careful approach to the washes will yield better results. Paint thinner really shines when doing work like this, but I know many people do not have it.

Won GW painting comp for gene stealer

I won a painting competition for best gene stealer at the GW shop today! We had about two dozen models in the competition, which was a very good turn out. The rules for what to paint were a little confusing, though at least this time I did not show up a day late. Two of us made the mistake of thinking that since it was a Space Hulk painting competition that we had to paint space hulk miniatures--this kind of logical thinking has cost us both before. I think I might just pull all the stops on the next painting competition and convert as much as I like. I won a box of gene stealers which were promptly traded away for the winners assault marines. I am very happy that the store is getting more competition, even though the terminator that took ~12 hours to paint lost and the 25 minute gene stealer won. I tried to encourage the older painters to join me in our own painting competition, but I think we would need to arrange it through the store. There was a very nicely painted dead Terminator, Librarian, and the overall winner Typhus.

I guess I need to consider painting the rest of my bugs! I'll post a step by step for the gene stealer so everyone can see how it was done.

Now I should finish the lightning claw Blood Angel for Jawaballs! I changes bases last minute and have had trouble getting my space litter to look right on the new base. (I know bases don't matter for this one, but I enjoy painting them)