Oldhammer Tyranid Screamer Killer

 Nope, I've still not painted any orks. 

Most of the posts on here boil down to "What I've made this week". However, there are a few things that go on for longer than that: usually projects that I pick away at, put to one side and return to gradually.

One of these is an Oldhammer Tyranid screamer-killer. The screamer-killer was the first ever Tyranid dreadnought, released around the time of the first Tyranid codex in the 1990s. It was, like a lot of the early dreadnoughts, a great big lump of lead that fitted onto a square monster base from Fantasy Battle. Back then, it was an awesome centrepiece model, a hefty monster with huge claws that killed its enemies by literally roaring at them. It looked like this:

Now, of course, it's dated and pretty dinky by comparison with the larger Tyranid beasties, and it's hard to avoid the fact that it looks like an enraged kidney bean. But it's still pretty cool. I happened to have the body and legs of one of these things. Unfortunately, I had no arms for it. Challenge accepted.

The arms are fairly simple scythe-claws mounted at the end of stubby arms (I've no idea how they would function in real life, but still, this is 40k...). In a fit of hubris, I decided to sculpt my own.

I cut out a piece of plasticard for each arm, which formed a template for the claw and the arm itself. I then built a central rod out of trimmed-down sprues for each arm, which gave me something to work around and provided solidity. Each arm ended in a plastic disc left over from an old tank kit, which was the point where it would attach to the miniature. You can see the basic model on the left of the photo below.

Then it was a matter of fleshing out the arm with DAS clay (for the basic shape) and green stuff (for the details). Easier said than done. Even simple shapes like these claws were tricky. The original model has serrated "teeth" on the inside of the claws, but I decided to leave these off, as they looked too difficult. The pair on the right above show how this looked.

Eventually, I had four sets of replacement arms. Sculpting the little "flexible bits" on the arms was pretty difficult.

Then it was just a matter of painting them, painting the body and legs, and sticking the whole thing together. I added a skeletal creature to its base, which I think was once part of an ogre kingdoms model. Here is the screamer-killer with its new arms.

Looking at the finished product, there are some bumps and imperfections in the claws, which I could have done better. But overall I really like this guy. Here it is with some little friends that I also painted recently. Much redness!