I'll mark those Termagants, Hormagaunts and Spore Mines down as finished

In theory the holidays should be a perfect time to get some painting work done. In practice however...As a freelancer I get rather a lot of extra work over the summer severely reducing my hobby time. With a possible move up in housing in the future well time has been a bit limited. I did however find a few hours over the past weeks to finish painting my 'Gants, 'Gaunts and Spore Mines.

Not the best paint job ever, but it serves.

Just to be sure, these are not works of art. But as in my Tyranid army they will serve as additional cannon fodder so I did not aim for high quality here. Not sticking out as especially ugly in the rest of the army is quite ok here. I started with an airbrush basecoat, heavy wash and drybrush of the skin color. Then I forced myself to sit down in one or two hour bursts to assembly line paint the red carapace, wash it and finally highlight them. After that it was a flesh color for the guns, flesh wash and finally a bit of purple for lolling tongues and a random dark wash around the mouths to make the teeth stand out a bit more. I did get a chance to listen to some interesting lectures while painting (thank you YouTube).

I have seen some horde armies that were meticulously painted on a model per model basis, mine isn't one of those. 

I acquired most of these models second hand (I love buying and (occasionally selling) old miniatures). Most of these were sent in an old shoe box and they smelled of frying pan. I had to strip them and a small number were so badly put together (or damaged) that they are lying in a 'to be smashed and used as bits box'. One of the painted models is missing it's left arm, quite a few others have a gap between the left arm and the gun. All reasons not to go overboard painting them. On the plus side. They were extremely cheap. After this additions my Tyranid horde has 40 Termagants with Fleshborers, 10 with Spike Rifles and 20 Hormagaunts. The shoe box still contains a badly damaged Hyve Tyrant and about 5 Tyranid Warriors on sprue. I should consider painting these soon.

I love Spore Mines in the new edition. 

Quite a few of these spore mines are made of metal with some plastic ones from an older starter set rounding things out. I had to fix the tails on two of these with green stuff as they had broken off. Unfortunately I'm not much of a sculptor, but luckily grass tufts help cover the worst of it. With 8th edition a lot of enemy troops can teleport/drop pod/burrow and fly anywhere onto the board as long as they stay 9 inch away from your models. The Tyranids offer quite a nice counter to these shenanigans with their cheap Spore Mines units. You can quite easily acquire enough to cover your deployment zone against unwanted visitors. And if they enter it a few turns later you can float towards them and explode. As the Spore Mines are flying units they can even give flyers a nasty hit. Basically 40K now has a mine field that actually does what mine fields are supposed to do (discourage the enemy from entering a particular zone).

These final four Hormagaunts round out a unit of twenty.

Spore Mines are also quite useful for taking over enemy area's. Allowing you to float down at a distance of 12 inches and be obnoxious in other board quadrants. Add the burrowing activities of Rippers, Trygons and the like and you can make an the life of an enemy overly dependent on deep strikes very hard indeed. Now I can even do this with reasonably painted models. I painted the 4 Hormagaunts on the last picture to expand my existing unit from the silly 16 to a nice even 20. Now I think I'll stop painting 'Gants and 'Gaunts for a long while. As a matter of fact I ended up working on the purple and blue Genestealers for my cult. Yes I'm sticking with purple and blue even if it means not fitting with the red and cream of this army.