How to Paint Tyranids: Fast Fleet Schemes

Tyranids come in swarms, which means the smart painter's goal is speed: a method that turns dozens of models around fast while still looking cohesive and menacing. This guide uses Contrast-style speed paints to knock out a classic two-tone scheme for the Tyranids, a coloured skin set against a pale bone carapace, so your hive fleet hits the table looking like a single ravenous organism rather than a box of grey plastic.

What You'll Need

The key to fast bugs is a bone-coloured undercoat plus a couple of Contrast (or speed) paints: one for the skin and one for the carapace, along with a shade and a bone layer for the claws. A basecoat brush and a detail brush are all you need. Painting from another range? The paint converter matches every colour below to Vallejo, Army Painter, and more. Contrast paints work best over a light primer, so do not skip the undercoat choice in the next step.

1. Undercoat

Prime the model in a bone or off-white tone. A spray like Wraithbone is ideal, because it doubles as the finished carapace colour later. A pale undercoat lets the speed paints glow rather than going muddy. If you only have white primer that works too; it will simply make the colours a shade brighter. Build it up in thin, even coats and let it dry fully.

2. Basecoat the Skin

Choose a Contrast or speed paint for the fleshy skin: a rich blue like Talassar Blue, a deep red, or a sickly purple, whatever fleet colour you fancy. Paint it over the muscle, the limbs, and the softer body areas in one generous coat. The paint shades itself as it dries, pooling darker in the recesses and staying lighter on the raised muscle. This single pass does the work of three or four normal steps.

3. The Carapace

Leave the hard armoured plates, the head, the back, and the large shell sections, in the bone colour of your undercoat, or deepen them slightly with a thin bone Contrast such as Skeleton Horde for a warmer, more organic look. The contrast between coloured skin and pale carapace is the heart of the scheme and reads instantly as Tyranid from right across the table.

4. Shade and Tidy

If any areas look flat, glaze a little more speed paint or a matching shade into the deepest recesses to push the shadows. Wash the claws, teeth, and talons with a brown shade like Agrax Earthshade to ground them. At this stage the model already looks finished from a distance, so everything that follows is simply polish.

5. Highlight the Claws

Give the swarm its bite. Paint the talons, claws, and teeth with a bone layer such as Ushabti Bone, then highlight the very tips with an even paler bone or off-white. Sharp, bright claw tips catch the eye and make the creatures look genuinely dangerous. On bigger monsters, a light drybrush of bone over the carapace edges adds quick texture.

6. Details and Base

Pick out the eyes, mouths, and tongues in a wet-looking red or a glowing colour to add life. For bases, a simple ash-waste or alien-earth texture paint, drybrushed lighter and edged in a tidy rim, ties the whole brood together. Keep basing quick and identical across the swarm, because consistency here does more for the army's look than fussy detail on any single model.

Final Tip

Assembly-line everything. Undercoat the whole brood, then do the skin colour on all of them, then the carapace, and so on down the line. Speed paints are made for exactly this, and a hive fleet of thirty-plus models is very achievable in a couple of evenings. Remember that a Tyranid army's horror comes from numbers, so good-enough-and-finished always beats perfect-and-unpainted.