Tyranid Termagants - Gooey Organic Colour Scheme

For the Overmind!... oh wait, wrong franchise...

Just for a fun little side project, I painted up a few Termagants recently. I actually got them for free from my brother, so I can't complain, but they were a bit of a sorry band of rejects when I first clapped eyes on them. Especially two of them that I stripped; having had ugly old paint jobs given to them some years earlier by some unknown eBayer.

For the scheme, I wanted to get a decent amount of colour in there, and make it relatively fast to paint. I used the airbrush to lay down some flesh-tones and then worked over that. I also used a decent amount of both Blood for the Blood God and Gloss Varnish on them to get a nice sticky wet look, which I like on my alien bugs from beyond the stars.

Probably the most interesting thing was building their biomass looking bases. I like to think they're inside the bowels of a hive ship or something. As this was a cheap project, I wasn't going to buy anything fancy, so I sculpted the bases myself using milliput. The style does vary across the unit a bit as it took me a while to find my footing. Basically, after a bit of experimentation, I found that creating a wave like texture a bit like a ploughed field worked well, and then pushing the rounded end of a paintbrush into the divots to create ribs made quite a nice looking base.

This was just a little side project, so at the moment, I'm not planning a full army or anything. I would like to try the scheme out on a larger monster, but maybe a bit later, I guess we'll see.