Oldhammer Hive Tyrant

Funny thing, nostalgia. I reckon that quite a lot of the old 40k models are objectively good: I've often said that the old Jes Goodwin Eldar are superb, and a lot of the old metal space marines are very detailed and full of character. And then there are the old metal Tyranids.

The first run of Tyranid models were pretty odd. The look of the army hadn't really been ironed out yet, and it wasn't helped by having some of the ugliest sculpts that GW has ever made. The old metal Tyranid warriors - from the 3rd edition, I think - are awful, goofy models. The termagants are rather cool, though, in a slightly dippy way, and I'm a big fan of the old plastic warriors that came with Advanced Space Crusade. They're just so weird.

Anyhow, on to a model that, on balance, evens out as just-about-good. It's the first version of the Alien Quee - sorry, the Hive Tyrant. The Hive Tyrant was a great big Tyranid that bossed the little ones around, while (hopefully) taking out enemy characters with its impressive and manky bio-weapons. Here's GW's version.

The model is the Tyranid equivalent of putting all the toppings on a cake at once. It's a weird mess of ridges, spikes, limbs, claws and hooves, and was painted in White Dwarf in a variety of lurid shades, like Giger's Alien depicted by Tank Girl. I managed to find most of the bits of one on ebay, and slowly accumulated the parts to make one of these things.

Oldhammer is fine, but I have no nostalgia for assembling fiddly lead monsters like this. Green stuff, pinning, filing and a lot of swearing was involved. I was missing the lower left arm and the whip-type weapon it holds, so I made my own from some spare plastic Tyranid gun arms. I'm quite pleased with the result.

I had two heads for this beast, both of which had it sticking out an enormous forked tongue. I really dislike GW's tendency to sculpt Tyranids sticking their tongues out like happy puppies, and I cut the tongue off and sculpted some more teeth. I ended up resculpting the entire lower jaw. Eek. I also added a plastic spike to the end of its tail, where the original part had been lost.

It seemed right to copy one of GW's paint schemes - incredibly, I went for the more restrained of the two options. I used contrast paint for the red areas of the model, and then highlighted them in the usual way. I tried to echo the paint scheme of the termagants. It took a very long time to do, because the model is covered in weird, fiddly details.

Whoa, that's a lot of detail! Some of the details are really cool: I particularly like the facehugger-type limbs on the gun (it's a barbed strangler, out of interest). He took a lot of time to paint. I seem to have painted his head to look as if it's carved out of raspberry ice cream.

I'm pleased with this thing, but it is really weird. Still, it will make a good centre point for the swarm of old termagants I seem to be forming!