Gaunts and you!

So I went shopping again on ebay and picked up a Tyranid codex for pretty cheap about 2 weeks ago.  After having painted that Zoanthrope, the painting itch hit so I picked up a Hive Guard and gave painting Tyranids another try.  It was quickly brought to my attention that testing paint schemes on expensive models was not a good idea, as you'll see below.  I'd recommend that anyone wanting to try new paints styles on different armies pick up the cheap $8 - $10 box of troops for their respective group.

I used a brown base under the orange on the Hive Guard instead of the fleshy base I used with the Zoanthrope, thinking that the brown base would shade the upper layers of paint in a positive way.

Bleh.  I mean the red isn't that bad looking, but it was shaded way too much in the brown direction that I just ended up highlighting it in red to see what it looked like. I think a chemical bath in LA's Totally Awesome cleaner is in order.  If you haven't heard about it, you can buy LA's at most any dollar store and it will strip acrylic paint off of models with the best of them.  I had to use it on the Zoanthrope because of a mess up with the clear coat, and the resin was not impacted at all while the removal of paint was almost totally complete.

So now what?  I want to paint beautiful nids, but can't afford to keep messing up on fancy resin models!  Short tirade on pricing: Games-Workshop prices their models according to their value on the field, and not their value in plastic/material/molding costs.  A Riptide, at $85, has just as much plastic in it as some of the $55 models, but since it's the big go-to unit for Tau, it's price is dramatically higher.  I'm sure this is already known by others, but it bugs (pun intended) the heck out of me.

Anyways, back to my original suggestion: look into smaller troop boxes and experiment from there.  This then is the result of those actions:

I'll get into specifics in another blog post on how I got the color shading on the skin, but suffice it to say I really enjoyed the method and I am very pleased with the results.  The picture truly doesn't give it justice, but it'll have to do for now. I have some other armor colors to try, as well the base they stand on needs some big attention, but if I could get the purple color at the right shade on the armor scales I should be set and ready to go.

-Cj