Space Hulk Diorama (5) – Tutorial: Painting Tyranid Eggs

STP ‘Pruno’

It’s taken a while to finish this section, due to it needing a bit of trial and error; but I thought it might be helpful to go through painting gunge-laden alien eggs. I wanted to make it look as if genestealers had made a nest out of flesh -as a nod to the Alien films.

Firstly, undercoat the eggs and the surrounding nebulae – you don’t have to use grey, I just find it to be an easy colour to begin with:

These are the colours I used to paint the flesh part:

Basecoat – cadian fleshtone:

Wash – a mix of black + smoke brown + cadmium red + Liche purple (ratio 1:1:1:1):

Drybrush – mix of cadian fleshtone + rotting flesh (ratio 2:1):

Drybrush – mix of cadian fleshtone + rotting flesh (ratio 1:2):

Drybrush – pure rotting flesh. I then painted a glaze of liche purple over the whole fleshy area to smooth it out:

Basecoat the eggs with GW Rakarth flesh; then wash them with smoke brown:

Stipple the eggs with a mix of Rakarth flesh + white (ratio 1:1); then stipple the top part with pure white:

I made the slime effect using Tamiya clear acrylics:

Along with Uhu stretchy glue, and epoxy glue:

And vallejo still water effect: which I forgot to photograph.

There was a bit of experimentation involved here, so it’s not quite a linear progress.

First, mix the Tamiya Green + yellow, with a small amount of the Tamiya smoke; then add the still water effect. The ratio here is a case of trial and error – but mix the paint first, then thin it by adding increasing amounts of water effect until you’re happy with it. If you use a wet palette, the mixture will be usable for at least a couple of days (for better and for worse, I have to say):

I used the Uhu stretchy glue to make slime entrails – stretching them from point to point using a cocktail stick:

When this has dried, use another cocktail stick to coat the stretchy glue with several layers of epoxy glue; which both strengthens the entrails, and adds texture:

I then brushed over the whole of this with another layer of the Tamiya paint/still water effect mixture:

I decided to add more slime entrails; but also sprinkled some microbeads over the fleshy area, while the Tamiya paint/water effect mix was still wet. This can be a bit fiddly:

Once all of this had cured, I added successive layers of the Tamiya paint/water effect mix – wait for one layer to dry fully before adding another:

I possibly added too many layers – I think I went a bit over the top with the green slime; but nevermind:

Finish by coating the whole thing with a layer of pure water effect:

Sufficiently stomach-turning.

 

 

I haven’t had much free-time to check out other painters’ works lately due to illness, but worth a look:

How to paint old-school Goblin skin (RealmOfChaos)

Warhammer monsters (TaleOfPainters)

Work-In-Progress Tzeentch chaos warband (Technasma)

Grom the Paunch conversion (Fantasy Games)

Harlequin Army (Hope River)