Hive Fleet Highfiveathon: co-op army painting progress

In January, Harvey and I decided to have a crack at painting a Tyranid army as a joint project. Today's post is a very simple one: who is it, painting a joint army in this way, what's worked well, and what have we done to keep up the enthusiasm and momentum?

This is a follow-up to Harvey's initial post in March, in which he explained the premise behind this project and how they're painted. We primed the first miniatures at the end of January, and after about four and a half months, here's where the swarm is at:

Yeah, that's 2,360 points' worth of Tyranids, and since this photo was taken, Harvey's done another 10 Barbgaunts, bringing us to 2,470. We're both slightly taken aback at how successful this has been, but it should be mentioned that Harvey has happened to have a lot of time off work recently, and as a result, he has made twice as much progress as me. Here's how it breaks down:

Harvey's bounteous effort

My modest glossings

It's a substantial difference, but such are the vagaries of circumstance. The fact that Harvey is so far ahead is, however, spurring me to get more done. I've got 10 more Gaunts, 3 Zoanthropes, a Prime and a Hive Tyrant built and primed, so once those are done I'll be past the 1,250 mark.

However, like the Tyranids, my brain likes to consume Contrast paint as part of a balanced and varied diet. Both Harvey and I have taken time to work on little palette cleansers to prevent the experience getting stale. In his case, that's ten of the roughest riders for the Nigthfall 31st, whereas I painted the absolute oppose of a Tyranid: a big metal box.

Get absolutely Coke canned

This stubby lad brings the Order of the Iron Ring up to a playable 1,000 points when paired with a few summoned daemons. Emphasis on playable rather than good, but the point of my Chaos army is to enable me to play on Team Daemonsimp when needed.

Speaking of things to make armies playable, my poor mechanised Guard platoon has been rendered almost un-useable by the slow march of successive rules changes, since I have one officer who can issue a single order to... one of my five infantry squads (the army's expanded a little since the showcase article). A Castellan is the obvious fix, since it's a single mini that can kick out two orders to REGIMENT units. Tom and I got right into the weeds discussing conversions I could do until I remembered: wait! I've got that cool-ass Catachan lady, Sgt 'Ripper' Jackson!

So she got assembled one day and painted the next, and as is always the case when grunting out extremely basic paint jobs for months at a time, it was a delight to do a bit of highlighting and layering, two itches that painting the Vindicator had absolutely not scratched. I played a game with the army shortly afterwards, and the newly-gazetted Master-Sergeant Anahera Karaka did great work.

I kept the red bandana on the basis that, despite being an Ankran like the rest of the army, one of her parents was Catachan and she leans hard into the heritage. The Officio Prefectus love a marketable hardass, so inevitably she now gets followed around by a picter crew in order to make Imperial propaganda.

This means that the outcome of the Tyranid project so far has been to make one fourly-armed and operational bug swarm, and turn both my Chaos and Guard armies into something that can see the table more.

Synergistic. Management. Solutions.

Our hope is to finish painting the Tyranids by the end of the year. The march of time always clips at a faster clop than I'm prepared for, so I think the question is not whether Harvey will succeed, but whether I will, particularly with so many sexy new ork kits on the horizon... but the orks can wait. I don't want to let my bug-choom down, and therein lies the true power of painting an army through the power of friendship.