Up today we have the Tyranid half of the Leviathan Starter Set. Now Tyranids are not really my thing. They’re kind of boring. They’re not my least favourite 40k faction (waves to Necrons) but I don’t really care about big faceless monsters and hordes of identical smaller monsters. Although I do dig on Genestealer cults. GCs are amazing and are full of character. I don’t have a GC army, but I have the cults part of Deathwatch Overkill and a GC chemist guy and a GC rockcrusher so maybe I do. I also have the majority of the genestealers from Space Hulk painted up, so I could run all these together as a big army or something. That might be fun. Normally I paint genestealery things in the traditional oldhammer colourscheme of blue and (titillating) pink, but I wanted these painted quickly using contrast paints and basic techniques. I flicked through the starter guide and looked at the different Hive Fleets and it was Kronos that stood out for me. I liked the idea of them being Chaos-eaters, developed to function in areas of high psychic activity and specialising in fighting daemons and eating daemonworlds. The dark red-bright blue-brown colour I thought would make an interesting scheme to paint and was different to anything I had done before. Plus all the colours were available in contrast so I didn’t need to mix or shop around.

These were both fun and frustrating to paint. My lack of experience in the miniatures or scheme definitely showed, but I was aiming to get them done so that I could play the game out of the box, not win golden demon. I didn’t enjoy it so much that I will be staying in the Tyranid game, and I’m not especially pleased with the result, but just painting a big batch of miniatures and completing the box set is a victory in itself.