Today I have something different to the stuff I’ve been churning out over the past months – something from Games Workshop – Forgeworld in fact. What we have here is the set of three Tyranid Capillary Towers that have been OOP for many years and that I’ve had sitting around here for many more.

They weren’t too hard to paint, though they did take me over a year from start to finish. They’ve been about 80% done for months even within that.

What was keeping me from finishing them was simply laziness – needing to get right in there and finish the “meaty parts” and all the rocks. The problem that was keeping me from starting them, on the other hand – was not having settled on a colour scheme for my Tyranids. This mentally blocked me from even beginning to paint them for many years until I finally just decided to get them started sometime over a year ago – probably for one of Dave Stone’s Season of Scenery challenges. I finally settled on using the “Cockroach Brown” scheme that I did paint a few Tyranid/Genestealer models in many years ago as a Combat Patrol – for a very old, White Dwarf version of the rules. Sadly, I’m not even sure where those models are at the moment.

I figured that if I go for a different Tyranid paint scheme in the future, I can always add contrast over the top of the brown to tint them red or purple or whatever. This way they’re finished and out of the house – they sat next to the printer for a year or so and Marouda always told me that she was worried one of us would accidently stab outselves on the spikes.

As you can see here, they’re pretty impressive looking next to a Space Marine, and have potential use for any other games that need some Alien/Kaiju Biomass bursting from the ground, etc. I always wanted (but never got) the triple-version of these – the Spore Chimney as it had gone OOP by the time I was thinking about ordering it. Luckily there’s no end of readily available STL files to make similar models to both Spore Chimneys and Capillary Towers and more these days – so if I decide to keep goiong with my ‘Nid scenery, I guess I’ll be doing that. I’ll probably have to start painting the models first, though! As models that I’ve owned for a decade or more, these ones certainly count towards Dave Stone’s Paint What You Got Challenge 24-25.

I’m aware that I do need to get onto more of my GW models – both as painting exercises and just to get more of them done. The difficulty is that the main game we’ve been playing has been Zombicide, I’m into the final sets of models for our 1st edition collection, and as I’m sure many of you will agree – games are more fun when the models are all painted – so I’ll just have to try to keep sprinking in a few more GW models, though unless I suddenly start playing 40k or AoS on the reg, I can’t see the focus shifting dramatically away from the endless hordes of Zombies.