Hive Fleet Mastodon / Xenofauna

It was inevitable, I suppose, that when I began collecting and painting genestealers and genestealer-like miniatures I’d also get sucked into some tyranids. It started with re-basing my ambull (mostly because I’d become dissatisfied with the base). Then I got fear of missing out on some very limited edition castings of fan sculpts on Facebook. Then I realised that the “alien” lists at the back of Rogue Trader were intended to use repurposed fantasy miniatures…

… and a side project, Hive Fleet Mastodon / Xenofauna began. It’ll include various odd tyranid models (and proxies) that I like, and an attempt to paint at least one miniature for each alien and warp entity in Rogue Trader. It’s been done before, and definitely better, but it’ll be a fun endeavour. Up first, some classic Citadel miniatures – an ambull, giant scorpion (or insectoid) and giant spider which I think were sculpted by Trish Carden, and gyrinx. Which is a cat. A very expensive cat.

A lot of the other models I’ve collected so far are sculpted by Ross Whitehorn for Krakon Games (and one for Shed Games). As well as the big tyranid, there’s proxies for the Rogue Trader crawler (a tentacled land-squid, for which I used the Shed Games kraken), ferrobeast (Krakon petradines/ferrous testudines), grox (grok) and pterasquirrel (dire squirrel).

For the cudbear, mimic (a small shapeshifting monkey in Rogue Trader), and psychneuein, I picked up a xenoursid predator from Knightmare Games, a tribute to the most famous shapeshifting alien of all, The Thing, from Diehard Miniatures, which I am well aware is not a monkey, and Heresy Miniatures waspquito, respectively. There’s also another tyranid fan sculpt here.

The rest are repurposed odds and ends – an Otherworld Miniatures eye tyrant (a beholder proxy standing in for a Rogue Trader enslaver), a Tom Meier big tooth woolly, available from Ral Partha Legacy… which might represent a bouncer (it’s got the legs for it) or a giant carnivorous sand clam (it’s got the mouth for it), and a fan sculpt squig that was bundled free with some other minis and might represent another insectoid or spider.

And lastly, a group shot (missing the mimic and crawler which I painted later). I’m not sure why this has come out so much worse than yesterday’s photo – I took them at the same time. Obviously my lightbox setup needs more work.