Showcase: Hive Fleet Kraken Hormagaunts & Termagants

Sometimes it takes the perfect motivation to dust off those half-finished projects lurking in our hobby drawers. For me, that spark came with the release of Kill Team: Typhon. Suddenly, my half-finished legacy Kill Team got a new lease of life thanks to the expanded NPO rules in the Typhon dossier. In this post, I show you the remaining models to complete my collection of Hive Fleet Kraken Hormagaunts and Termagants.

Completing my (legacy) Kill Team

The release of Kill Team: Typhon (our review here) motivated me to get out my last remaining unpainted gaunts and finally give them the finishing touches. Originally, I had started them as a Fire Team for the Hive Fleet Kill Team from the last Kill Team edition’s compendium, but thanks to the rules from Typhon, they’re also perfect for cooperative games as NPCs.

To complete the Fire Team of Hormagaunts and Termagants, two things were still missing: a fifth Hormagaunt, and a devourer for one of the Termagants. And here they are.

A Fire Team actually consists of 8 gaunts of your choice, but a Termagant with devourer counts as two selections and brings a bit more firepower. Originally, I had painted the Termagant with fleshborer, but I got myself an extra arm for swapping.

Hive Fleet Kraken painting guide

For the painting, I stuck closely to my free Hive Fleet Kraken tutorial, which you can find here:

There’s one change, namely that I made the skin on the Hormagaunts slightly lighter to enhance the contrast. I began with a basecoat of Vallejo Game Air Scarlet Red, followed by a zenithal highlight of Vallejo Game Air Anthea Skin and Vallejo Game Air Dead White. Just like in the original tutorial, I then washed the flesh with Dreadful Visage Contrast paint.

I’m still very pleased with the contrast between pale skin and deep red chitin, and thanks to techniques like zenithal basecoating and Contrast and Speedpaint colours, the painting goes along at a good pace too.

I’d love to paint the new Tyranids Raveners from Kill Team: Typhon as well, but with the release of the Horus Heresy: Saturnine Box (review here), I can barely keep up. And Kill Team: Tomb World was already announced last week too!

Feel free to leave a reaction, or drop a comment below, I’m also happy to answer any questions on our friendly hobby Discord server. Thanks a lot, and happy hobbying!