This weekend, Warhammer 40,000: Leviathan goes on pre-order. Inside the box are two armies of gorgeously detailed plastic miniatures, just waiting for you to build and paint them. As ever, the ’Eavy Metal studio have worked long and hard to create the definitive versions of all of the miniatures in the set. We caught up with Max to find out what went into painting such different forces.*
WarCom: How did you and the ’Eavy Metal team approach this massive project?
Max: A big part of the ‘Eavy Metal team's job is to explore and develop colour schemes and iconography for all of our miniatures, way before any of the actual painting gets started. With a project like Leviathan we always invest a lot of time and effort into the early stages of development, pushing ourselves and exploring new avenues for that project before we refine all that work down to an end result. Since the box is split across two opposing forces, we are essentially working on two main projects at the same time.
Not only does each side have to accurately represent their own faction and engage with their side of the narrative, they both need to visually work alongside each other as two opposing forces on the battlefield. We made a conscious choice early on to make a clear distinction between the hardened veteran elite of the Space Marines versus the writhing organic monstrosities that make up the rapacious Tyranid swarm.
WarCom: The new incarnation of Hive Fleet Leviathan brings with it a variety of hues and tones across the range. Can you talk about how you tackled these hideous creatures?
Max: Revisiting Hive Fleet Leviathan presented a unique range of creative challenges. Tyranids are the only army in Warhammer 40,000 that is organic through and through, with absolutely no heraldry, armour, or insignias. To key into the organic, mutative nature of Tyranids we decided to vary up the Leviathan scheme more than before. Our development resulted in us finding inspiration in a variety of wildlife and undersea creatures, tapping into ideas such as the age or size of the creature and its role within the hive fleet informing the thickness of their hard shells and the colours on their bodies.
We approached the various miniatures in Leviathan with a focus on creating natural transitions across their bodies. Changing the apparent thickness of their carapaces helped us use a wider range of purple and bone tones than we’ve seen previously, employing lots of soft blends and glazes to add to their alien menace. You can see this with the Neurogaunts and the Neurotyrant – the former have a much brighter, thinner looking carapace, while the latter has darker, thicker armour which represents its age and resultant thickness of the armoured material.
The actual palette is still quite restrained, but the variants mean that the end result is a more believable organic mass with plenty of variation, which I think offers up more interesting and satisfying painting opportunities for hobbyists – there’s no need to stick to one solid scheme across your Tyranids!.
WarCom: There are lots of other organic components that make up the Tyranids. Can you talk about some of these details for us?
Max: Many of the Tyranid weapons are living, symbiotic creatures. To help reinforce this we made sure each biomorph looked like a distinct element against the rest of the creature, using similar organic tones but not dipping too much into the main body colours.
For the Neurotyrant, we took inspiration from various bioluminescent creatures to give the brain matter a more exciting and alien look than regular grey matter, and while painting it we kept in mind how the light that might refract through this semi-translucent organic material. The armoured crown around the brain features some freehand that’s consistent with similar psychic effects we’ve painted in the past, like where the Broodcoven’s Genestealer Patriarch, is touching the brain matter channelling psychic energy through to its pointing talon. These both reinforce the idea that these leader-creatures are sending out synaptic pulses to the rest of the hive fleet.
WarCom: The other half of the box has been painted in the colours of the Ultramarines. What went into these warriors?
Max: We have a really strong foundation to work from for the Ultramarines – so the early work on their side wasn’t really about what colour blue they should be. Instead, we looked at how we could single out individual Space Marines by giving them unique markings, or by adding subtle weathering like you can see on the new Phobos-armoured Lieutenant, which makes him look like he’s had a terrible time surviving on his own against an overwhelming Tyranid force.
Beyond this, we put a lot of thought into capturing the presence of elite 1st Company Veterans through insignia and personal heraldry. One of the big things that came out of this process was the revisiting of all First Founding Chapter iconography – not just the Ultramarines. We worked closely with Jes and went back through a lot of his original sketches to rework, refine, and add more variety to the transfer sheet, compared to those found in launch sets from previous editions. There are a range of options on the sheet that tie into six of the biggest Chapters, several of which play a direct role in the 4th Tyrannic War. There are also plenty of variants of each of the symbols, which gives you lots of choice when applying them to your miniatures, and makes this transfer sheet the perfect tool kit for anyone looking to personalise their Adeptus Astartes.
It’s safe to say that many of us on the team are huge fans of Space Marines in Terminator armour, and we were champing at the bit to get painting. Against the backdrop of a Tyranid invasion on a galactic scale, pulling the Imperium back into the maw of another Tyrannic war, we painted a good selection of individual Terminators showcasing a range of Chapters fighting against the tyrannic onslaught. Working closely with the background writers, we chose key Chapters that featured throughout the campaign.
WarCom: Some of these Terminators are floating around on social media and previous articles, and there are also a variety of mysterious Tyranid hive fleets. Where did these figure into the process?
Max: When we were painting the Tyranid side of the box, we found that the early development work had unlocked new and exciting concepts of how to approach and vary up the tones across each hive fleet. We also ended up with a range of strong ideas that we could translate into brand new hive fleets! It’s always worthwhile trying to experiment with new things while we hone the image and the identity of an army, and these are some of the results we ended up with. One of the most important things to us was that the Tyranids always felt utterly menacing and totally alien, which helped inform the colour choices. In the end, they have to look like nothing you would see on Earth, even if you can see elements of nature incorporated into these colour schemes and markings.
Everything mentioned before blends together to make Tyranids feel wholly unique, and because hive fleets are less prescriptive than Space Marines you could easily take the markings from one fleet and apply it to another, or vary the strength of colours across the range as we did when determining the colours of the carapace on each size of Tyranid monster. Hopefully these examples, along with the Tyranids in the Leviathan box, will help inspire people when they paint their own.
WarCom: Was there any one thing that you and the team found particularly enjoyable in your experience painting the Leviathan boxed set?
Max: The process of painting Leviathan meant a lot of jumping back and forth across the two sides to keep it fun and exciting – someone from the team might paint a unit or a character from one side, before swapping to the opposing side to keep things fresh and the inspiration flowing.
Anyone planning on painting up Leviathan for themselves will no doubt experience the same and appreciate the variety between the two forces. The difference between the hard ceramite of the Space Marines and the fluid organic shapes of the Tyranids presents so many opportunities for different paint schemes and techniques. We tried to show this off as much as we could with our approach to the miniatures, and the variant schemes that we produced to really hammer home how massive this conflict is, and how varied the world of Warhammer 40,000 is.
Ultimately, the Leviathan box is just packed full of a large variety of different models that all offer up exciting painting opportunities in their own right. I can’t wait to see what people do with their own collections once it’s finally in the hands of hobbyists around the world!
Thanks for the insight Max! You can apply all of these insights and colour schemes to your own miniatures in just a few weeks. Warhammer 40,000 Leviathan will be available to pre-order from Saturday. Check out our in-depth Sunday Preview article which details everything you need to know ahead of the day.
* It’s not Max’s first rodeo on a Warhammer 40,000 launch set – check out his insights from way back at the reveal of Indomitus.
