Lictor

The last cricket match of the summer between New Zealand and Australia meant a day in front of the television, which of course led to a day of painting. I used the time to paint my zoanthrope brood and my scratchbuilt Lictor. With these done my 2016 hobby project (1750+ point Tyranid army) was complete.

This is the second incarnation of my scratch built Lictor and he's been made out of scraps from a number of other kits. I wanted him to be a lot creepier than the GW Lictor, so went for a much taller model and also gave him a bit of a stoop.

He's been modelled with a bunch of bloated sacs on top of his carapace (unused venomthrope bits) to reflect his ability to release a pheromone trail for the rest of the swarm to follow. I've also given him whip arms (again from a venomthrope kit maybe?) to represent his flesh hooks.

When it came time to paint him I decided to try out a totally new technique and paint him emerging from hiding having used his chameleon skin ability. I'd seen a couple of examples where people had used clear plastic, I'm assuming they had 3d printed these, but went down a different path for my attempt. 

I wanted to represent him having blended into the red, rocky landscape before standing up for a kill so I painted his rear right section using Citadel Martian Ironearth just like I have done for all my Tyranid bases. Having done some very heavy edge highlighting for better definition on these sections, I then painted the rest of the model in the same scheme as the rest of my Tyranids, before driving myself halfway insane trying to blend a smooth transition between the two.

The results aren't perfect, but I've got myself a unique Lictor on both the modelling and painting fronts (as best I know) and got to try out a new painting technique, so I'm putting this one down as a success. Oh, and NZ won the cricket making the day an even bigger success.