Hive fleet colors and patterns

[infornography]

If someone tries that out, let us know how it works. I wonder if it would be effective with how thin our paints need to be generally, it looks like it depends on paint being pretty thick.

I have seen people use toothpicks to paint fine details with though.

[hivefleetkerrigan]

Found it!! Feast your eyes! (All puns intended). Note for 100% clarity: this paint job is not my work.

www.reddit.com/r/Warhammer/comments/cs65t7/painted_my_first_eyes_on_my_skink_star_priest/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=comments_view_all

[Kyokii]

There's this one guy I saw. On/tg/ who paints exclusively with toothpicks. His stuff was beyond golden daemon level, absolutely astounding. I'll post if I find any of his stuff again.

As for multi-pattern Tyranids it's probably been hammered out enough in this thread without me actually reading anything. But! Back in 2nd edition, when nids were a lot less Cohesive-looking as an army, multiple colors were used to help differentiate units in some displays.
Plus, even marines do it (chaplains come to mind) so, why not?
I'm working on how I want to do my rework for my nids. Might be subtle and add onto synapse. Then five gants a simplified version of the scheme to show the thinner chitin. I like the coconut crab/dart frog combo for sure.

[HiveFleetExotica]

May 4, 2021 1:22:02 GMT kingpram said:

May 3, 2021 10:44:20 GMT HiveFleetExotica said:

. Yeah so the whole hive fleet would share a similar color pallete but something like a carnifex would have a purple pattern similar to the royal starfish and than my warriors would have a purple pattern similar to the harlequin toad. The plan for my hive fleet is to use exotic real life animals as references with the color purple as the primary seeing as purple is an exotic color as well.

I agree with both of you in a way. I think its more to do with how you paint than the scheme itself. If you are able to have a scheme that allows for detail, extra colours and fancier techniques but also a watered down easy version for your smaller guys, then you've hit the sweet spot.

For most people that could be feathering the carapace on larger MC's/warriors and simply having the carapace be a plain colour or have one edge highlight on gaunts.



Another big part is how you actually break up your painting into steps. If you paint Leviathan as a white base sprayed, purple wash, then 2 highlights of white leaving the fleshy/joint bits purple. That would be a pain for horde armies, gaunts, stealers etc. But if you can dumb that down to a white spray, wash and single drybrush it'll speed up the process over infantry and still let you paint detailed MC's.
Going back to your Royal Starfish/Harlequin Toad example; I believe your Toad pattern would translate to something like this:




I couldn't find a detailed pattern for the royal starfish, unless you mean this:






I would recommend the zoanthrope style pattern for your smaller models and something like the coconut crab on your larger models, using a similar colour pattern. 



For example ^ Although I wouldn't do this for smaller models it can work if you're batch painting/have a buttload of patience. 

yeah that’s one of the references I’m going to use another one I’m doing is vampire crabs for my genestealers and the emperor butterfly for my flyrant I’ve seen Instagram posts where people use animals as references I’m not sure how to post pictures on the forum because I only use my iPhone