Painting: Mycetic Spore

A few months ago, I bought a beautiful (if you can call it such) Tyranid Mycetic Spore on eBay from Halestorm Gaming. I felt pretty fortunate to get my hands on his casts as I had followed his work as he posted on a Warhammer forum, The Tyranid Hive. I asked him in a private message to let me know if and when he would be selling casts, since I was having no luck and no love with my own attempts. He sent me a message when they went up and I signed on just a few hours later, just in time to snag the last one.

Because of my inactivity at the painting table of late, the Spore sat mostly neglected until I went on a bit of a tear this weekend and got it done in one fell swoop. Since it would be in my dark scheme, I started by priming it black. 

From there, I went with my airbrush (more on that later this week) and started by highlighting up the ridges and raised portions around the fleshy bits, first with Incubi Darkness...

... and then on to Jade Green:

I added some white to my mix for the final highlight on that part. 

Next up was the carapace bits at the bottom of each ridge. For these, I took a lesson from one of Les Bursley's videos and used silly putty to mask off parts I wanted to keep from the paint.

Once each was masked off, I used Mephiston Red and, holding the ridges at an angle, hit the top edges of each plate with increasing density of paint, resulting in, what I think, is a nice blending effect that was very quick. 

Up to this point, the whole spore had taken me maybe forty-five minutes, including getting my mixtures right and masking. From there, all that was left was painting (by hand) the fleshy bits and lash whip appendages at the top with Putrid Green and then a slight highlight of Putrid Green and white. Finally, I finished off the nicely detailed base with a drybrush of Grey and in under two hours, my Mycetic Spore was complete.

I wouldn't say it will win any awards, but it was a quick job to get it up to an acceptable quality and it helped me gain motivation to be more disciplined at the painting table. Additionally, it will provide a wonderful pain-delivery system for my devourer armed devilgants.