Tyranid Fast Attack

Fast Attack

Draconids (Winged Warriors)

Warhammer 40K is a game of collecting. Even a seemingly completed army can add new figures. Thus I found myself buying 3 more boxes of Tyranid Warriors for the Swarm. In the back of the Tyranid Codex, there are rules to make new species. My idea, after having seen how well Gargoyles serve the hive mind, was to make bigger ones with big nasty sharp teeth: DRACONIDS -Winged Warriors.

I collected my parts. There’s a little hobby shop in town that was on the verge of closing down forever. He severely discounted his models and I got 3 boxes of Warriors for a song. I ordered some claws from GW for a deep discount at the Seattle tournament. For the wings, I found an old out of production Ral Partha dragon that had medium sized wings I really liked. I made molds of the wings and cast resin copies of them for the Draconids.

The warriors were converted. Like the other warriors, I gave them necks. This made them match my other two versions of warriors a bit better, allowed me to rotate their heads into more interesting and animated poses and generally improved the models. I also cut the ankles and curved up the feet to help the flying look. I pinned the wings in place, positioning them for dramatic effect.

Like the rest of my warriors, each Flying Warrior has a unique carapace color and design. The Maroon color I used on the 2nd edition warrior is out of print, so for the Draconids I worked around Liquitex Basic Alizarine Crimson Hue, Permanent.

I couldn’t keep the weapons uniform since GW had changed the design so much from 2nd edition. I couldn’t even keep them consistent with my Raveners. I found effective colors nonetheless which may be my standard scheme now. I had hoped to have metal bases ready for them, but they weren’t. I loaded up the bases with as much lead as possible, found a good stiff wire for attachment and based them on the Planet of Dandelions, like all my other models. I was grateful the models were all plastic - they don’t fall over half as much as the gargoyles. I also prefer these bases to the clear ones of the gargoyles.

As of now I have 4 Draconids with Rending Claws, 2 with Deathspitters, 2 with Devourers and one with a barged strangler. All have Scything Talons. They’re pricey, but so far, very effective and very cool.

Draconid Yearbook

Gargoyles (2nd Edition)

In second edition, fast attack were Hormagants and Gargoyles. Now they have Raveners and Gargoyles. I don’t have any Raveners yet.

Third Edition Warhammer 40,000 promises to bring better gargoyle figures. I hope so, because the second edition weren’t great. They worked fine, had enough detail to paint a soldier, but that was about it.

These were the last units I painted for my army. I guess the lack of detail kept making me pass them over for other units. When I finally got around to them, I still couldn’t find too much to do with them.

I kept to my conventions of bone claws, but I changed the fleshborers (oral guns) to blue, they looked different than the ones carried by the termagaunts. I went with a Caucasian flesh tone for the wings and body, washed them aggressively with Chestnut Ink and then drybrushed the flesh over it again. I divided the dozen I had into two swarms of six; one with blue shell, the other with green. They were simple.

I will probably augment my gargoyle swarm with 3rd edition, but there’s no hurry. I have a few other projects waiting.

Gargoyles (3rd Edition)

Gargoyles are one of my favorite Tyranid units. They never fail to earn their points. They devastate devastator squads and melt marines with bioplasm. However, Games Workshop seems incapable of making good looking gargoyles. The second edition looked hastily made, the detail was soft the figured and poses uninteresting. But then came 3rd edition which were actually worse.

Gone were the elegant curved wings of the 2nd edition, a saving grace to be sure for lame triangular ridgey things.

The guns are better in the 2nd as well - particularly since the 3rd is supposed to have the weapons growing as part of the critter. They’re reversed: the 3rd edition’s carry the guns, the 2nd’s grow out of them. Weird and wrong. Still I needed some more of these to build up my swarm and these are what’s available.

I had enough old paint to match the color scheme of the previous gargoyles. Of course Ral Partha, the maker of the original paint, is defunct. I used lots of Amerindian and Chestnut inks with highlights for the bodies. The guns were blue to match (why do I like blue guns so much? -it’s totally subconscious) Since I had broken up the original gargoyles into groups of 6, I had to find 2 different carapace colors for these 12. The mouths were based white and then stained with Magenta Ink. The talons were basic and the black-lining had to be done by brush - I couldn’t get a pen to work right.

They fall over a lot (like their predecessors), so I coated them in Dullcoat to give them a modicum of protection.

They’re a decent edition to the swarm. They add more color and confusion to the table and will be attacking marines in no time!

Red Terror

I figure that the Red Terror is a derivative of the Ravener, maybe all Raveners become this big if they grow old enough. Someone should study this.

After struggling to paint the Raveners for months, I was shocked to look up after only a day or so with a complete beautiful Red Terror. Maybe it was the uniqueness of the model (only one in an army) maybe it was the conversion, but something made painting him enjoyable.

Once again Games Workshop made a hunched-over monster. Like my Carnifex conversion, I wanted to open him up, make him taller and make the detail visible from angles besides underneath. I pinned the upper and lower torsos and made an arch in his back. I filled in the stomach with putty and managed to approximate the skeleton shell on the front.

Painting was straightforward. I used Liquitex Cadmium Red Medium Hue for the skin. It’s a nice bright red hue, a value not represented in the rest of my pretty red Tyranid swarm. I used washes of Chestnut Ink and Shadow brown for details. The claws and teeth were painted uniform to the rest of the army.

The white shell was something of a challenge. Light colors are always difficult. I needed several coats of white to get the base color. I used a white/light gray mixture and painted in the shadows. I picked out highlights with Titanium white.

He’s my Danish Tyranid, red and white like Danebro.

Raveners

When the new Tyranids came out I saw that I pretty much had all the figures I needed. There were only a couple of new creatures; all the rest were just new models of existing types. One of the new troops was the Ravener. They looked to be a good augmentation to my Fast Attack Gargoyles.

I bought 3 of the figures online and spent months painting them. It wasn’t that they were particularly hard to paint, it’s just I couldn’t bring myself to finish them. The yellow/orange went on well enough and the shells were complimentary purple and not too difficult. The only problem in painting were the devourer guns. I tried to make them the uniform with the devourers the Tyranid Warriors had, but the color just didn’t work and my patience was too lacking. I went with another complimentary color - blue.