Tyranids Warhammer 40k Hive Fleet Paint Schemes

By Travis Pasch | February 4th, 2024 | Categories: 10th Edition 40k, 40k News & Articles, Games Workshop, How To Tutorial, Tabletop Gaming News & Rumors, Tyranids

GW shows their Warhammer 40k Tyranids Hive Fleet paint schemes with the ‘Eavy Metal team at the helm- check it out!

With tons of new Tyranids models, you better get your paint schemes on point! It’s always cool to see how GW does it, as so many people use them as references for their own armies. This isn’t the most detailed step-by-step tutorial, but they do show off every paint they use! The main scheme is Leviathan (obviously), but they also show off plenty of other Hive Fleets, so if you don’t want to go with Leviathan, you’re still in luck!

How to Paint Warhammer 40k Tyranids Hive Fleet Paint Schemes

All these Warhammer 40k paint schemes come from Warhammer Community.

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.

The new Tyranids are really cool looking and have tons of organic parts all over! But we already knew that, so let’s see what paints they use on their models:

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!

They do use a lot of paints, but with them laid out, it shouldn’t be super hard to follow. Just remember, you go from the top down, starting with the darker stuff and moving to the lighter colors. While Leviathan is cool looking, they have plenty of other schemes for you as well.

Hive Fleet Behemoth

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.

Behemoth is another pretty standard scheme, and painting Tyranids red can be fun!

Hive Fleet Cetu

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.

While this isn’t as popular, this looks really cool, and with this, you should be able to get it out in no time! Especially considering painting black can be faster than some of the other colors.

Hive Fleet Kraken

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.

Hive Fleet Kraken has been a favorite for a long time, and if you want to paint your Warhammer 40k Tyranids with any of these schemes this should give you an excellent base to experiment with.

Hive Fleet Lotan

While they use a ton of colors on all of these schemes, you can always simplify your palette and get a similar effect on your army.

Hive Fleet Tiamet

If you go with contrast paints, this can actually be a simple scheme with a really great effect!

Hive Fleet Typhon

Last but not least, we have Typhon, which is a pretty in-depth scheme. While it looks impressive, you will have some work cut out for you. There is a ton of blending on the skin and a lot of highlighting.