Learn a fast and striking way to paint your Behemoth Tyranids. All you need is vibrant red skin and a dark blue shell to be ready to devour Macragge.
The premise of all Tyranid schemes should be that they are fast enough to make and easy to replicate.
This enables you too paint your entire army and not give up halfway through because there’s so many of them.
How to Paint Behemoth Tyranids
Behemoth Tyranids are a staple in the game, being that they are Ultramar’s favorite threat. And if I know one thing is how much everyone loves stuff that torments Ultramarines.
As such, it’s important to learn how to make them look their best, quickly.
Our strategy for this scheme is to keep a lot of black showing through with very vibrant highlights to maximise the contrast.
Red
The red is this blog’s favorite colors, covered 19 different ways already. Over a black base coat, we highlight with Mephiston Red followed with Evil Sunz Scarlet.
Make sure you leave enough black showing in the recesses of the skin to have a very steep contrast between the black and the red.
If you are painting a large monster, you can come back with Evil Sunz Scarlet t add extra highlights with a brush. Even if it’s the same color, applying it with a brush will make it brighter and will crisp up your red, specially next to black areas.
Blue
The same strategy of keeping a lot of black showing through our behemoth tyranid is repeated in the blue shells, which we start by painting black.
Next, we highlight them using Kantor Blue. Unlike a regular highlight, you want to work around the edges of the shells to give the blue a direction. As such, we highlight the outer parts of every plate, not necessarily the raised areas.
Repeat this process with Crystal Blue or Ahriman Blue, leaving some of your Kantor Blue streaks showing.
Lastly, we want to shade the plates to blend the black and the blue together. You can use Nuln Oil or Drakenhof Nightshade, depending on how dark (Nuln Oil) or vibrant (Drakenhof) you want the plates to be.
Not all blue are created equal, and a lot of people opt for turquoise here instead of blue.
If you want to go that route, use the same process, but swap blues a darker turquoise and lighter turquoise. I would probably keep the blue shade, or switch to a black one, and get a very strong xenomorph feel.
Details
Most tyranids don’t come with a lot of details, but the few they have we want to accent and make them stand out. This is usually eyes, toxin sacs and adrenal glands… all the fun things that make you love bugs, basically.
We want to paint those bright green to make them truly stand out and give our otherwise dark model some pop!
Start on a Moot Green base coat, and highlight with Flash Gitz Yellow. Then add a light glaze of thinned down Warp-Lightning to make the colors pop even more.
Base
Because of all the vibrant colors on the model, a muted base works best.
The one we picked in a light brown, but an earth of grey one would work just as well to showcase our behemoth tyranids models, like the one for this Parasite of Mortrex below.
