I absolutely love this series, take GW sculpting inspiration and unabashed quality and setting aside their matching painting vision, review the models instead through the best of proven, favourite movie franchise art direction and creature effects, what a winner. This one is particularly good, combining in itself GW's own revision of the xenomorph concept (never afraid to borrow) with the original movie look and then carefully and cleverly breaking it down into combinations of well understood mini painting techniques to make a really useable workflow. Genius vid. Clearly you can choose a different secondary colour whilst still following the workflow, the subtle green example works really well and avoids the baseline GW blues and purples to give a fresh differentiating look. Using just a black base wouldn't normally even be classed as the primary being chromatically a shade and not a colour. but the black is so respected and enhanced it certainly is the primary and arguably two greens are secondary and accent. This keeps to the movie franchise simplicity of colour and makes your eye hunger for the accents, which in turn makes them work strongly. This is great stuff. I don't need to worry about avoiding GW tropes and I do love me my purples, violets and indigos so I'm tempted by a very dark purple base, nearly black but not quite and then lighter cooler purples as secondary and accent. I use my xenos to terrorise colonists and soldiers so my lighting and basing scheme is verdant jungle at night. cool pale light and darkish deep greens and then reds for accent blossoms that don't much catch the moonlight the way the xenos do. The darker desaturated greens and reds will make the purple features really pop, whilst adding just enough to offset the monachrome. Red is a tempting secondary two tho and given a rebel red colony is an alien comic thing I'll have a few at least once the main force is done. They'll make a scary surprise if the are able to spit for instance.
Thank you so much. I'm really enjoying making this series, it's nice to have fun with a model and paint it however you want. Having your own colour schemes using inspiration from loads of different media is a really good way to make an army unique. The colour scheme for your xenos sounds really cool. I love using different purples in painting, I think it adds a real richness to the colours of models. It's also a great colour to use as a middle ground and highlight or shade using reds and blues to create some really interesting looks! You could almost do some dark purples and reds on the lower half of the models and deep greens on the top like some kind of camouflage against the moonlit forests, that could look really cool!
@DrunkOnTeaUK Being honest (full disclosure) I only use half a dozen tyrannid models as feature models in my xenon forces. Most are licensed Alien models from the AvP v1.0 kickstarter board game. I picked up tons from ebay when the backers were really angry. These are the gorgeous hard plastic multipart kits, not the soft plastic monopose stuff. This means there's a lot more smooth rounded carapace, ridged crests but not plates over skin and scale. That means I can put a few dots of dark/deep purple just where the light hits/glints and then blend it into the black oil underpaint (probably with a touch of ultramarine blue in the black, not enough to recognise but enough to make you scratch your head). Then the subtle purple burnished along the crown of the head etc will look so rich, like a really deep purple custom paint job at a car show. Then back to acrylic catching edges and vertebra etc with edge highlights to define the anatomy bring it to life and likely glossy varnish to the carapace sections with just tiny hard white dots of light to force that glossy reflective look. Satin to the non-carapace parts again to sell the glossy carapace even more
The Alien collour scheme features a brownish tint on the carapace highlights and some heavy use of glossy varnish on the "armoured bits" of the body. This way looks cool too, but it´s not very reminiscing of the film. Still, a good paint job and a pleasure to watch. Try doing a Hive Tyrant painted as the alien queen next time.
It was my own take more on the "style" of Alien. All the green lighting in the movie, the green grow from computer screens, the green in films title and poster, etc. A Hive tyrant as the Queen would be pretty cool, maybe I'll paint it in a more "true" scheme.
...why green though. In Alien and Aliens, they're more blue. Personally to get close to the films I went with; black primer, white drybrush, dark blue wash, very limited light blue highlights, and silver teeth.
I was going to give it a coat of gloss varnish, but then realised I had run out of gloss..... I don't think matt varnish would have really given it that shiny look.
How about a fire team of Tau painted like Star Wars 501 Clones? Or, Guardsmen done up like Star Trek TOS Star Fleet (yellow command, red sgt, blue enlisted)?
The assassin as spawn is an interesting idea, I'll have to keep that in mind. I've been thinking about trying some cell shaded paint schemes, it will probably take a while to work on and get the look correct, but it's been in my "to do" list for a little while, so keep an eye out!
Should’ve given him that blue glaze from the second movie and then green claws so to stand out on the table but still staying true to the film and turned out great 👍
