Painting: The New Scheme

 

A long time ago, I was trying to figure out how to paint my Tyranids.  I had a few ideas, and I tried each one of them out on a single Genestealer to see how they looked.  They were all fairly simple, striking colors, two of them based on insects, and one based on Storm Troopers from StarWars.  Eventually the one based on the Storm Troopers won out.  It also gave an arctic look to my Tyranids, so I added some fluff about them starting the absorption of a planet in the arctic regions, before moving on to more heavily populated areas.  My original paint scheme was white over the entire figure, with black bands around the joints and a few other places, then red eyes and tongues and biomorphs.  While this looked striking on the Genestealer models, it was harder to do with my Slashers (the leaping gaunts I use) and still keep the banding looking right.  I wasn’t really sure how to improve it, so I just kept on with it, figuring it would give the army a coherent look.  I toyed around with several ideas to make them look better.  One thought that occurred to me was to paint the model white, then use a black ink wash to get the black into the crevices, keeping them nice and dark while the higher parts of the creature were white.  Unfortunately, the wash leaves some of itself behind on the higher parts, making the white look rather dirty.  I also considered basing them in black, then painting white over all the higher parts.  This would darken the white and require a steady hand on my part and a lot of work on each figure, not things I was looking for.  I eventually resigned myself to just giving my army a coherent look.

 

Several of my friends are excellent painters.  While I do not have the skill they do and I do not wish to take the amount of time they do with each figure, I do want to have good-looking models.  One of them (Thanks, Dark Angels Mike!) suggested a good, quick paint scheme for my Tyranids that wouldn’t require lots of talent or hours on every single figure.  He suggested that I use a grey basecoat and drybrush the model white, using drybrushing as my primary painting technique.  (Drybrushing involves getting a small amount of paint on the brush, then wiping it almost entirely dry, then brushing it across the model, so it leaves a small amount of paint, and only on the highest surfaces, since it takes liquid paint to run down into the crevices.)  Drybrushing is a very useful idea on detailed models, like those made for GW by Citadel.  They have a lot of highly detailed pieces that can be easily covered up by standard painting techniques.  Drybrushing is also very useful for someone that doesn’t have great painting skills (like me) but still wants to pick out those details.  I've currently painted up my Slashers in this fashion, and it goes pretty well.  I do think that the grey is a little light, however, so I'm considering the black ink wash again.  This time, though, the dirty stuff left on the raised parts of the figure will be covered up by the drybrushed white, so it should work quite well.