I wish i had gone for such a simplistic but effective colourscheme.....
Someone asked me, what colours i use and so i think i will post my workflow here, maybe it is of some interest to you:
First of all i used some pictures of the local hornets as a starting point. I tested some schemes in Photoshop and pinned the printed images as a reference above my painting table. It looks something like this:
After many weeks experimenting i developed a decent workflow that is still too long to be effective for such a large army, but hey, painting is half of the fun, so i don't care how long it takes. Here's what i do:
01- Base Coat with Chaos-Black Spraypaint
02- First overpaint with blood red (not too much, black still visible)
03- Second overpaint with blood red (opaque with black still visible in gaps)
04- Drybrush highlighting with Mechrite Orange
05- Using thinned chaos black to fill the creases and slots especially at the hinges and joints
06- Filling the mouth and eye sockets and painting the Claws and hoofs with chaos black.
07- Painting all carapaces with skull white as a basecoat for the yellow paint (which won't be opaque on the black/red otherwise)- Also painting teeth and eyes white.
08- A layer of golden yellow over white basecot on carapaces.
09- Painting the patterns on the backs and drybrushing the bases with Dark flesh. I wanted every subspecies to have its own distinguishable set of lines and curves, so that they may be easily recognized on the battlefield. So Hormies got different patterns than Raveners and so on....figuring this out took quite a while...
10- Painting the inner markings of the patterns with Chaos black
11- Giving the bases some more light with vomit brown
12- Highlighting bases with Bleached Bone
13- Highlighting the highpoints on arms and legs with a small line of vomit brown
14- Giving the weapons and claws a metallic finish with boltgun metal (my idea was, that the tyranid organisms produce some kind of metallic oxide to form their weapon-biomorphs. This way it looks like a crossbreed between "held" weapons and bodyparts).
15- finishing details on weapons with either tinbitz or shining gold/burnished gold
16- Painting the tongues with dark angels green (acid maws get two more layers of lighter greens for highlighting)
17- Using a little flesh wash (only got one left....hope it will last for the rest of the army for it is no longer available but far superior to the new washes) on the teethridge to make it look less clean.
18- giving the carapaces a full treatment with 'ardcoat, drybrush the bodies with 'ardcoat. (I used to use the satin varnish spray but some day GW changed something with the mixture and i ruined six full painted minis. Since then i only use varnish that can be applied with a brush)
19- Painting the rim of the base with khemri brown.
Ok, that...that's quite a long workflow.....i don't advice to use something like this for a 5000 points army, because you might, like me, take forever to get the bugs painted:))
Have fun
PS: I love this thread btw...NIDS for the win...