Back in 2010, I had dipped my Tyranids for the last time.
Flash forward to 2014, and I’ve finished painting “my last Tyranid model,” though I know full well that if I keep playing this game, I’ll wind up dipping them again in a few years (or maybe even more frequently than that, given that the last two endeavors were just over a year apart).
Still, it’s an accomplishment to have painted the last model in my army. And we’re not talking about a small skirmish force here. At last count, the tally was somewhere north of 10,000 points (or as much as 14k, depending upon how you look at it). I haven’t bothered to do the math again, but I’m sure that once they’re all dipped, I’ll work up a proper spreadsheet again, along with new army shots of everything (though I might need a bigger table for that!).
The last model? The Red Terror.
I didn’t plan for him to be any sort of special finale or anything. In reality, he was more of an oversight. I had some bits laying around (an almost complete model, really), and figured if I was going to be bothered to dip, I might as well paint him up as well. And so he was born.
I went into the details really in my earlier post, so I won’t rehash those here. One thing I noticd though is that my interest in doing quality work with these has waned as of late. I’ve been trying to finish these up since January, and now I’m at the stage where I’m just rushing them out (not that I ever took a whole lot of effort on this army, mind you). Still, I had him pinned up, and spent a few days looking for my green stuff. Eventually, in my searching, I stumbled upon another section of gray sculpting putty—which is practically the same thing, right?
Well, then I discovered that I couldn’t find my sculpting tool. Seeing as I’d already spent a few days looking for putty, I just grabbed a dentist pick that I had laying around and used that. As a result, the putty work on his lower scything talons and the blob that holds his body to his tail aren’t exactly stellar (which is putting it mildly). Thankfully, the lower arms are all but covered up by his flailing talons and large tail, and the tail itself is bent in weird places, so the sharp turn where it meets the body almost looks natural.
Not that I care to do anything about it. I’m just glad to be finished, and I don’t care to go back and touch anything up. I know that’s the wrong attitude to have (especially because I’m only “finished” with this stage: they still need to be dipped and based).
Honestly though, I’m happy with how he turned out. That might just be me settling, but he really doesn’t look bad to me. The head still looks large when viewed from a model’s eye view, but from above, I think he looks quite good. The paint job is basic, as always, but I gave him some splashes of red (to signify the name). One thing about the paint job that changed though is that I took the red stripe off of the back of his skull. I originally wanted to make him stand out a little more, but I think he’s significantly different from the rest of the raveners that the stripe was unnecessary, and I didn’t like the way it looked in the photos.
He’s now joined a pile of other Tyranids waiting for a bath in polyurethane. Sadly, I just remembered that I gave away all of my 2’x4’s last week, so I’ll probably have to go buy a couple of more in order to make some rigging to properly dip/hang the various parts. Doh!
Warhammer 39,9999 