Shortly before Christmas, my local game store received one of the new plastic Tyranid Trygon kits for display purposes. As it happened, I was in there at the time and casually mentioned that I’d like to paint one but wasn’t going to buy one just to paint. The manager told me that I was welcome to paint the display copy once he’d magnetised it and so I ended up painting a modular Trygon/Mawloc.

Jakob spent some time magnetising each of the different options to make them interchangeable and this is mostly pretty straightforward. Each arm has a magnet in the ball joint and there is a corresponding magnet in the sockets. It’s worth spending some time here to make sure that the magnets in the arms are at a good angle. Each arm overlaps the one above it to a degree and thus needs to be splayed out a little to clear it. If you put the magnet in the same position for each arm then they won’t fit properly. The tail has a pin as well as a magnet and each tail tip has a magnet and a hole drilled in it to accept the pin to ensure that it lines up properly and doesn’t twist. The complicated area is the head as there are a lot of optional parts in a relatively small area and these need magnets in different places. The mandibles can be attached just like the arms as they have a simple ball and socket joint on each side but the two jaws present problems. The contact area for each jaw is quite small and the Mawloc mouth part is pretty large so needs a solid connection to hold it in place. Jakob was able to make the regular Trygon jaw fit by putting a magnet in the cavity within it which connects with one inside the head. These are some distance apart but with sufficiently powerful magnets, the attraction is enough to hold the jaw in place. The Mawloc mouth parts however don’t have a convenient space to hide a magnet in as they are spread open with no solid sections. My suggestion was to not magnetise it at all and have two pins running backwards from the back of the jaw into holes drilled in the head section to hold it in place. Jakob however used flat magnets greenstuffed to the back of the jaw and the front of the  head. I still think my solution was better but Jakob’s works although it needs a bit of cutting and greenstuffing to make everything fit. There are also different carapace sections for the top of the head but there wasn’t enough room to fit yet more magnets in the head so Jakob picked one and glued it in.

Once Jakob had assembled and magnetised the kit, it was handed over to me for painting. I sprayed it white and then deliberated on a colour scheme. Jakob wasn’t a fan of the standard Leviathan colours of purple and white and I think the Behemoth red and blue scheme looks too busy so I compromised on a purplish-brown with pale green scheme as a good contrast using non-standard colours. Tyranids are composed of two main textures: chitinous armour and ribbed flesh, I chose to make the armour dark and the flesh pale. To start with I painted all of the flesh areas with Rotting Flesh. This was then washed with Thraka Green and then highlighted with Rotting Flesh again. Once that was dry I glazed it with Enchanted Blue before applying final highlights of a Rotting Flesh/Bleached Bone mix. As this is quite a large model and there are lots of extra bits, this took some time.

The chitin was painted Scorched Earth initially and then washed with Asurmen Blue. This gave a very dark and warm purple that was almost black. I highlighted this with Leviathan Purple in small amounts of Skull White before glazing it with Lich Purple. Final highlights were in Warlock Purple mixed with Tentacle Pink. Highlighting chitin is relatively simple although it’s time consuming when dealing with the number of separate plates on the Trygon (plus all the different claws, mandibles and so forth). To start with the highlight was pretty subtle and was applied towards the trailing edge of each individual plate. Then the lighter highlights were painted on very quickly in thin lines down from the middle of the plate to the trailing edge. As the highlights get lighter these lines become shorter and more closely spaced, this provides a smooth highlight while keeping the chitinous feel. Finally edge highlights were painted around the vertices. The flesh inside the jaws was painted Tentacle Pink and washed with Leviathan Purple before highlighting with Bleached Bone, this provided a sufficient contrast with the rest of the model without making it look unnatural. The eyes were done in blue and painted as gems instead of irises and pupils.

The whole thing took me a while due mostly the sheer size of the beast. Highlighting that much flesh and that many plates is fiddly and time consuming even with a big brush and thin paint. Still once it’s together it looks pretty impressive.

Check out more pictures including work in progress shots on this gallery page.