I don’t always like posting gifts that I’ve made for people who are close to me, especially for people who are a little more reserved like XenonMage. Where I tend to cave on that a little, though, is where third-party models are concerned because I want to make sure that I give credit to smaller producers who make fantastic (and *cough* non-GW) models. This is one such third-party model, Nertha, the Faceless Mother by Raging Heroes, and this is a miniature that I’ve kind of given as a gift to XenonMage twice now, since I got her the kit a couple years back and then as a gift again helped her to clear it from her Pile of Shame ™.

There’s a deep lore to this character and “take” on the model that I shan’t expand on, but the idea was that I wanted to paint something up that could be a stand-in Synapse Tyranid or something that could be an HQ proxy model for XenonMage to work with. The build was pretty straightforward, as I just popped Nertha on top of a genestealer burrow from another kit, added some rocks, and called it a day. Can’t say enough good things about this kit and all of the little details – this one did end up with some regrettable warping but I think that’s more a storage issue on our end than anything RH-related.

In the end I’m very happy with how Nertha turned out – and, for illustrative purposes, while I won’t do a full gallery for these bad boys I wanted to show how Nertha looks paired up with a bunch of other Tyranids in the same army, who I also recently painted for XenonMage as a gift since she’s been out of town for a while. I think she fits in great and I think she’ll add a lot of personality and flavor to the army. (Also, I gotta go on record and say that as frustrating as they are to paint, Forgeworld Rippers might just be one of my favorite sculpts of all time. Just saying.)