Swarms the Heart

 

Plenty of Tyranid reinforcements this summer, eBay had some good deals going. Paint the boring ones first, is my rule!

The one with the fin is from the old batch for comparison

Nineteen Termagants is nothing you're going to leap at the chance to paint. But Pootle needed twenty Termies with Fleshborers for a recent skype battle, and I only had eighteen. The new batch had five beetle grubbers, so I did the others while I was at it. 

It's the same paint job as the original lot, so nothing much to show off. Some of the original colours are now gone, but even if the leg armour is a bit paler they match perfectly well in a big swarm. Good to have a bit of variation, in fact. 

Most of these new ones have Devourers. I can now do a full devilgant squad of thirty, which is pretty murderous firepower by anyone's standards. There's also two with spinefists! Nobody ever gives Termagants spinefists, its a downgrade compared to the other guns. Expect a rewrite when the new codex arrives. Giving them Pistol 2 for 'gants would make them a much better sidegrade, for example.

The other request from Pootle was for Rippers. Rippers are good, cheap annoyances that can pop up on objectives, and clearly a good idea for 9th, so they'd been on my shopping list for a while. I had enough bits from various old sprues, donations from Stylus and the eBay stuff to put together a couple, then I got a bit creative and stole some bits from Deep Madness. 

There's even a Cloaker (Reaper Bones) in there, the flying thing. These are going to be some of the more obscure bioforms that maintain the inner workings of hiveships and such, the equivalents of osteoclasts or macrophages from the human body. Weird blobby creatures that will eat you, basically. The hatching egg used to be an objective marker, but it's made the grade to Troops now, so I can field up to six bases of the chompy horrors. 

Quick to paint, as Nids need to be - it's mostly green inks over white basecoat, sort of a knockoff version Contrast using paints I already have instead of buying new. Kislev Flesh, Seraphim Sepia and Eldar Flesh drybrush, a little freehand for the carapace markings and done. More for the swarm to come!