A while ago our local GW store was giving away a single Tyranid bug-warrior figure for free. Of course I snagged one, who doesn’t want free stuff? I’m never going to bother playing 40k, but a random free figure? Sure!

I glued the critter together (GW makes some… interesting engineering choices in how their figures fit together, some of the parts are weird AF…) and then it lurked on the corner of my painting bench for months and months.

Then I realized that in Corey’s in-development Under Alien Suns rules you could run damn near anything as a crew, so I kitbashed together half a dozen figures a couple months ago and decided, for the hell of it, to grab a hat with big feathers on it from my 17th Century plastic stash and glued it to bug-guy’s head.

Then in the doldrums of the year I finally primered the whole motley crew and starting painting them. Bug-guy caught my attention and he got finished today, right from primer to done (barring some cleanup on the base) just today.

I went purple for the exoskeletal bits, dark red/black for the flesh bits, and bright green for the rifle that may or may not be grown right out of bug-guy. I’m really pleased with the highlighting, especially of the purple and the gun.

I’ll be getting paint on the rest of his crewmates in the next few days; I don’t go back to work until Jan 6 of 2025 so probably have time to finish all of them!