Three cool (but challenging) conversion/painting ideas.

[Phenex]

The other day I was pondering color schemes for my army, and I wanted to do something original, and ended up with these three ideas.
Bioluminescence- I don't know how I would accomplish this, maybe with glow-in-the-dark paint, or with LED's but the leds would be pretty hard.

Crystals- as in the 'Nids themselves have crystals growing out of their backs and are painted stony colors, maybe they could be curled around giant crystals on their bases too.

And the last idea is that they would have rocks, dirt, moss, and trees on and growing on top of their backs, this might require some other conversion in order to make them seem like they were bigger, and had a reason for the trees. I also pondered the idea of other plants, like mushrooms, or tyrannical plant-things, as in some sort of symbiotic relationship.

So what do you guys think? 

[blackrainbow]

Each of those is pretty neat but sound time-intensive. I like the crystal idea and the bioluminescence, but yeah, had to pull that last one off. Perhaps look up some things that naturally produce that and give a model a test paint of that.

Depending on how much of a fluff-monger you are, the last one with biomass all over them seems to drift a bit. But, it's army and I love conversions. Which ever one you choose, I would try one full conversion/paint before you commit to the entire army. Let you see how things work out.

[Kyokii]

For the big bugs- Crystals would be cool. power source in the base... lot of money on batteries though
I like the crystal idea, myself. It soulds like it would be hard work but fun. maybe replace the vents on the big ones with crystals? Makes me think of Kaiju.

[yoritomo]

Bioluminescence can be done with paint effects. Just google objective source lighting and you should find a tutorial on how to do it. I suppose you could use glow in the dark paint, but then you would only see it if you played in the dark. Nobody is going to play you without the lights on.

You'd pull the crystials and moss off the same way, just glue it to the back and green stuff it until looks seamless. It's really not that hard.