Hive Fleet Profile: Hive Fleet Hyenna

Here is some content I solicited from Erle, my follower from Belarus.  I'm a big fan of natural looking nids as you know mine are also inspired by beetles and wasps.  Erle's nids caught my eye back when he sent me a link to a small batrep a few months back.  Enjoy!

Hive-fleet Hyenna

Hi, Aaron. My real name is Alexander but most of my friends call me Erle.

I live in Belarus. I’ve started collecting tyranids two years ago. The first box with bugs was “Battle for Macragge” starter. I’m an engineer and that was first time I held paintbrush in my hands, so I took some painting lessons from friends. I decided to make “cockroach” as a guideline for my tyranids color scheme. So, this is my first painted gaunt:

COLOR SCHEME:

BODY:

- Scorched brown (basecoat)

- Beastal brown (large highlights)

- Graveyard earth (Upper highlight)

- Graveyard earth + Dheneb stone (1:1,one more highlight)

- Dheneb stone (extreme highlight)

CARAPACE:

- Dheneb stone (basecoat)

- Brown ink (washing)

- Dheneb stone+ Beastal brown (1:1) (wide boarding)

- Dheneb stone (thin boarding)

- Skull white (extreme highlights)

- Brown ink (washing again)

Eyes – Blood red, datails – Camo green

So, A lot of layers for the start. That’s why I spent about a month painting my first 10 gaunts… Then my wife became pregnant, I moved to a bigger flat, so for about a 1.5 year my tyranids spent on the bookshelf.

After warp-storm in my life passed, I continued painting. At that point Inks were no more produced by GW. And I started to use Washes… This is what I’ve got with a “speedpaint” technique:

I also created a piece of terrain from starter bits:

Resulting painted starter:

Spore mines:

From that time I spent a lot of time looking for the color scheme I like. So, The resulting was a “mixed color complex carapace with simple quite plain body”. This is the resulting gaunt (I used hormagaunt bodies with devourers for devilgants. I like this model more than a termagant bodies):

As time passed, I produced more and more gaunts….

And stealers…

Then I created a “flying zoanthrope” model. The secret is to use a resin zoanthrope, not a metal one.

Besides, I dislike metal models. But, nevertheless, I have ONE metal model in the army – a broodlord:

Later, I decided to conquer magnets:) For the Prime purposes. I liked the results:

And my last work is a simple Tervigon conversion. I tried to make it look real, as I do with all my minis.

After my 1000 pts. Army was completely painted I played my first warhammer 40k game against Imperial fists. So, I have a lot of plans for my hive-fleet. The first show-off is going to be on 28 of May, at the team championship.

·         My blog (Russian): http://hive-fleet-hyenna.blogspot.com

·         Batrep agains Imperial fists 1000 pts (Russian): http://hive-fleet-hyenna.blogspot.com/2011/04/1000-pts.html

·         More pics: https://picasaweb.google.com/Radiofisik/Portfolio

Hope, you like it.

Erle.

So there you go.  I hope you enjoy his models as much as I do.  I think the washes and highlighting are fantastic.  Thanks go out to Erle for writing this up for me.  If anyone else would like their fully painted and based tyranid models featured, don't be afraid to email me hyv3mynd@gmail.com.