Working on the Brood Lord

Well we have some, rather slow progres on the Brood Lord. I'm utterly amazed at how many layers of detail this sculpt has. Just in order not to mess up everything while moving on to other areas I'll have to do several arms seperately and started first on the rather complex base.

I was really stuck on the termi heads though, and that was pretty much where I needed to start as he's holding one in a claw which will be inaccessible once I start on the skin. So after 4-5 testheads that didn't work out due to wanting to do 7 different heads I've just settled on using my Relictors colourscheme on all of them. They are unlucky geezers anyway, so loosing some termies to a Brood Lord is in character.

As an added bonus I have to say that the darker scheme and shadow grey really work well with the rest of the base and planned colours for the skin and carapace. So here is the progres as of 2 hours ago (fixed about 20 little mistakes on the helmets and metallics etc since)

And some quick detail shots of, obviously wip skulls, the termi helmet in the Lord's claw and the deeper, internal fleshy bits in lovely purple:

Really enjoying putting more purple into my overall Tyranid colourscheme. First off, it really helps to break up all that read. Secondly, I just really enjoy painting 'organic' purple. On symmetric stuff like power armour or vehicles I don't have half the fun compared to doing little segments like this.

Purple is also a very nice colour to experiment with, particularly in the highlighting process:
- start with chaos black undercoat
- paint warlock purple (or liche purple, if you still have this one, bit darker though) on the desired segment
- highlight it with a 75/25 mix of your purple and bleached bone
- keep adding more bleached bone on the more extreme highlights until you're happy with the effect
- add an extreme highlight (only on the more raised areas or on a specific part of the purple part (lower section works great)) using another warm colour to give it an even more alien and organic feel
- personally I find that orange work great
- give it a nice, light glazing of purple ink to finish it off (rather like pergamano tinta drawing inks myself)

Just 1 more day to finish this critter, it's going to be tight! After that I'll have 12 days left for the Trygon I've been putting off for about 2 years now. Should be interesting!