How to make a biovore

Our former member, Zolwik, posted this step-by-step tutorial showing how to make a biovore in a pretty different way. I think his idea is pretty interesting for somebody who want to have a special and non-typical hivefleet 🙂
Enjoy!

This is a tutorial how to make some interesting non-standard Tyranids from bits that you can find in plastic Tyranid kits and some greenstuff. Conversions are very easy and fast to do, as they are generally thought to be useful mostly for players, who want nice looking army in short time.
I’m not good at writing so I’ve taken a few photos at every stage.

This time it will be how to make a biovore.

What we need

warrior body
set of warrior scything talons
set of hormagaunt scything talons
one ripper
left arm from warrior barbed strangler
chitinous armour plate from gaunt weapon sprue
green stuff

Carving and glueing

The first thing to do is preparing the warrior’s body. Cut off the shoulder armour plates to make some space for front legs.

Remember to round the edges with knife.

Cut off the rear part of the neck to achieve a flat surface- this will be the place for the ripper’s head.

Cut the ripper in half and match the head to the body.

Remove the plastic triangle that is standing out in lower part of warrior’s body and glue there chitinous armour plate from a gaunt

Take the barbed strangler arm and cut off the bag with spore mines.

Prepare the chest by flattening it with a knife and place the spore mines bag there.

Now it’s time for the legs. Take a scything talon and cut it apart as in the picture. Make the end of it round and make sure that it fits the holes in the main body.

Standard scything talons aren’t identical so you have to adjust angles or legs won’t fit on standard biovore base.

If you have done all the previous things you should now glue legs into place. The best method to do it, is gluing all legs at once. You should find a good pose and look out not to place them very wide because they wouldn’t fit onto base.

Green stuff time!

The next step is to hide the leg-body connections. The fastest way to do it is placing there some greenstuff. Make a small roller and place it directly on the connection. Then push some small channels with a sharp knife. This will give you a nice looking pattern.

Fill in any gaps near the bag with green stuff. To achieve smooth surface stroke it with wet finger several times.

The final stage is making his rear part 😉 Load lots of green stuff into the hole and push the pattern similar to that from legs.

Make the central channel a bit wider than the rest by pushing it with bigger knife or sculpting tool.

Done!

And that’s all. Biovore is ready for a battle err… I mean painting 🙂

And do you create your own variants of Tyranid creatures? Or do you go with the standard ones? Or maybe you have interesting ideas of conversions which could be made with Tyranid models? Why don’t you share them with us here?