Finished Space Hulk Nids

So they are finally done!

It took me about a month to get these guys done. Working in dribs and drabs, but in the end I'm fairly happy with how they turned out.

I'm quite happy with the pink of the skin. The grey is unusual but I like it none the less. The army painter soft tone really helped me finish these guys off. I might hold off on space marines for a while.

First ever attempt at Army Painter Dipping!

As I posted previously I picked up the army painter strong tone quickshade. I am in the middle of building up the ratmen, put I really wanted to give this quickshade a go, ahh............really quickly!.

So my nid's from Space Hulk are still to be finished and it came to me, that the quickshade would be perfect! This of course would mean that the the purple shade would have to be cancelled, but if I could quickly get these nids done it would be all good. So back to my good old test nid and quickly finished off the base.

I have to have a pre-dip picture don't I?

Then I dipped. In my stupidity I decided to try and video this! So video'ing in my left hand, dipping with my right hand. So excuse the shaking and weird camera angles.

So despite me losing my grip on the mini, half way through I think it has worked out fairly ok. I've given him a couple of more sturdy shakes when I had both hands free to get rid of the excess shade. I have now placed him still to one side until this time tomorrow, and we'll see how he turns out. 

Quick Space Hulk update

I know in my last post I said that I had painted nothing over the weekend as I was away from the paint and brush. I did have the inital coat of pink on the nids from the space hulk game done before I left, which I had not shown before. So here they are.

There we go! Only a very quick update today. Looking at these guys I will have to do another one or two layers just to get the pink perfectly smooth. As you can also see, I did get the inital basecoat of red on any marine armour they have ripped up.

Space Hulk Nid Continued 2

Hi all,

From my last post you can see that I was not that happy with the chitin and how it was turning out. So i just decided to go out and give a couple of different colours a go and see what i liked.

This first chitin colour was the previously shown GW Hormagaunt Purple.

This second colour was GW Fenris Grey

This third colour was GW Mordian Blue

And the final colour was GW Astronomican Grey, with a Purple Wash

I actully really liked this final colour, especially when I had give it a wash with GW Leviathan Purple Wash. I think this will be my final colour scheme, as it has everything I was looking for, simple to do, with just three colours, followed by a Leviathan purple wash and striking. Hopefully the next post with nids in it will have all the Space Hulk Nids painted up like this.

Space Hulk Nid Continued

Ahh the wonders of a test mini! Having painted the carapace of this guy in Hormagaunt purple and given it a wash with both Leviathan purple and Badab black, I was not happy. The "greyness" of the Hormagaunt purple was not deep enough for me, so I decided to change tack and decided to give GW Liche Purple a go on carparace. It turned out a lot better I think, but I'm always one to give a bad idea a second chance, I decided to try out the Hormagaunt purple on the claws, which once again I'm not happy with, so I think I might give the Liche Purple a go on there two.

I am also very happy with how the Vallejo Warlord purple turned out on the tongue. So as a paint scheme checklist goes I am very happy with the pink fleshy bits and tongue, reasonably happy with the purple carapace and not happy at all with the claws. I still have one or two idea's to play with colour scheme wise, so don't be surprised to see this poor test model back again.

I am just trying to keep my goal of a simple paint scheme foremost in my mind! A black basecoat, two or three solid zones of colour and then then addition of a wash to finish is the aim. Of course it has to look some way half decent too!

Space Hulk Nid WiP

It seems that like most people in the world who have any interest in the world of GW and 40k especially, I got very excited about the limited edition release of Space Hulk. Now the 2nd edition of the game was the very first game I bought from GW and myself and my brothers put down a great summer playing around with it. Of course I caved in and bought the game even though I had initially tried to hold out. I think everyone agrees that while its basically the same game as the 1st edition, the really improvement is in the quality of the miniatures they supplied in the box. I still use and have the original terminators from the 2nd edition of the game, but the new ones are a real generation leap forward in terms of detail and craftsmanship. Both the terminators and genestealers are just crying out for a nice paint job to set off the quality of the sculpts. Having painted alot of space marines in the last year or two, I was first drawn to the genestealers and decided to try and come up with a paint scheme slightly different from the box version but not too different. I always liked nid schemes that suggested the soft squishiness of the nid under all that hard chitin armour. This is what I've come up with.

Firstly a undercoat with Black

I then went with a basecoat of Vallejo "Squid Pink" for the fleshy bits and GW "Hormagaunt Purple" for the harder chitin on the arms, legs and body

For the first wash I gave the whole model a light wash with GW "Leviathan Purple" and left to dry

Thats where I've gotten to so far. The Leviathan Purple wash has not shown up great on the chitin area's so I'm thinking of hitting that with a Badab Black wash. I think I am going to leave the flesh as is for now though. I want to transfer this scheme to the rest of my nid models. I have a battleforce here somewhere and I don't want a time consuming highlighting method if I have 50 gaunts to paint. Next update will hopefully have this test mini finished off.