Painted up six devourer termagants and the remaining two zoanthropes, but pictured alongside the already painted ones to contrast the oldest models painted in this general style and what it has come to. The older models were painted close to a decade ago (I'm not quite that slow of a painter, but there was a 6 year or so break from 40k), but were the first tyranid models I painted when I came up for the concept for the color scheme.

I wanted to go for dark green armor that got brighter at its edges and an earth tone brown flesh, picking brighter colors for guns and other details. The idea was to make an alien-looking creature (the models certainly help), that's camouflaged to blend into a bright, lush jungle - armor with foliage, skin with the ground and debris, and bright bits with the blooms. I made quite a few tweaks (as seen) to the initial idea, focusing mostly on brightening highlights to beyond "natural" to get detail and color to stick out at a distance and extending those highlights over everything instead of just the brightest spots to bring out the detail of the models. While I don't think the zoanthropes are perfectly done (and I don't think the older model fits the paint style as well), and there are some things that still need tweaking (like the devourers), but I really like what has come out of that original idea, and I'm glad that the swarm is starting to look like a proper swarm.

Next for painting is probably some plain fleshborer termagants, as I haven't finished any of those yet, and probably venomthropes, since they see so much playtime on the table and I think will work well with this paint style. Maybe before that, though, I'll make another piece of terrain or two, as much for just having cool terrain as it is tabletop survivability in the form of cover and LoS blocking.

August 24, 2015