A Tale of Five Gamers - Week 14-3 - Jono's Tyranid Update

Jono's Week 14 Update

Hi All!
Well, I can safely say that the past two weeks of my life have been ‘interesting’. As I am sure I mentioned a few weeks ago, I was the best man at a friend’s wedding, which has actually cost me a lot of time, and somehow money! Alas, the vows have been said, and my speech was awesome, so, back to reality!

I am still in the process of painting my gaunts, and although I haven’t finished any more, I should hopefully have a batch of 10 finished for photographing in the next week or two!

One thing that I have made, is a little comparison shot of my gaunts, from start to finish. I apologies for the terrible light, I just can’t seem to find a good source of natural light in the new place. Heck, I am not the best photographer in the world either!

Going from left to right, these are the 5 main stages of my painting process.

1. White undercoat. Nothing more to say here, I use Halfords white primer. It has a slightly grainy finish (may be my method), but it works on the nids!
2. Badab black wash. This is the first layer of the Badab wash.
3. Badab black wash. I wanted to show the difference here between the two layers, and how different they both look! I am finding that as I go along, different models are getting different amounts of wash on them, and I really like this difference. Adds a bit of character to the army as it were.
4. Skull White (claws, teeth), Mecharite Red (carapace), Tallarn Flesh (tongue, flesh). These flat colours are painted in the areas that I have said, sometimes two coats, just to give a good coverage. I find that quite often with the white I need to put 2 layers just to get a reasonable look through the uneven Badab wash below. Normally this would bother me, but with the wash going over the top, it just adds to the effect!
5. Gryphonne Sepia (claws, teeth), Baal Red (carapace, tongue and flesh), Badab Black (shadows in the carapace). This last stage is quite simple. Washes! I apply 2 layers of both the Gryphonne Sepia and the Baal Red in the areas stated. The Gryphonne Sepia makes a massive difference, and the second layer is just to my taste. 1 layer would look just as good on a much lighter model. The Baal Red doesn’t really make that much difference on the carapace, so I put down 2 layers. If you look at the 4th and 5th models, you will see that it doesn’t look as flat. On the larger models, I have found that the more uneven I paint the Ball Red, the better it looks, go figure! The Baal Red on the tongue/flesh just makes it look a bit more realistic, the two colours go really well in my opinion! Lastly, I just run a tiny bit of Badab Black in the gaps in the carapace. Namely all overlaps on the heads and legs. This really brings the little guys to live!

This seems to take me up to 2 hours per gaunt, and about 5 hours per larger model. This may be a long time, but I am very happy with the outcome. If you were to rush it, I am sure that someone with a steadier hand could get the same finish in much less time. Equally, I would recommend this to other n00bs, as it’s not really that hard to get a reasonable standard on the table with this method!

Also as a final round-up here are some other pics from the past week or so.

See you next week guys!