Tyranid Exploding Spore Mine:

 I started here with a wash of my "bone wash" over all areas. Much like with the Infestation Marker, the color had a tendency to settle in the lowest parts of the mini since the whole thing is on a downward slope - to alleviate that, I held him upside down whilst brushing on the wash and shifted him side-to-side during the drying process to ensure even coverage. I started painting the flesh areas right away (since I've got the colors out for some other minis at the moment) and I basecoated these in 2:1 GW Dwarf Flesh/Brown Ink.

 I basecoated all the raised bone areas with thinned 2:1 GW Bleached Bone/Brown Ink at 1:1 paint/thinner consistency, followed by selective layering of thinned paint after adding two drops of VGC Bonewhite. I'm finding that Vallejo Gaming Color is a little thinner in consistency than Citadel paints, so I need to add less thinner in general. I tried to paint all raised bone areas with at least a thin coat of the new light color, with a greater concentration towards the outer edge of each bone "scale."

 I'll be doing the edge highlighting next with my tiny 0000 detail brush, so I'm not too worried about how sharp the edges are so long as I've got a larger proportion of this lighter color to layer blend into. I'm also not too finicky about the gaps between the bone "scales" at this stage, since I'd imagine I'll be hitting 'em with thinned dark brown lining-in at some point.

 This step was really involved, given that it felt like I was painting millions of tiny little bone scales on the damn thing. I persevered, though, and I think the end result justify the hassle, what with the extra time it took applying edge highlights to each. Essentially, I painted 1:3 VGC Bonewhite/thinner over all the individual scales, drawing my brush from the inner part of the scale towards the outer part of the scale.

 I then went back over each and, holding the mine upside down, painted from the bottom edge of each scale around the whole edge to the top edges of each - again drawing the brush so the greater concentration of paint ended up towards the upper edges of the scales. I maybe did two coats of this on each scale, maybe a little less on the undermost scales. It felt like it took forever and it makes me glad that there's not a lot of these Explosive Spore Mines in the Macragge set... the rest should go much easier/quicker, as the flesh painting parts of things seems to flow pretty smoothly.

 This step is fairly straightforwards, in that I overpainted all the previous base flesh color with 1:4 GW Dwarf Flesh/thinner, making sure to leave the darker base color in the depressions between tentacles and such. The trickiest part, really, was getting even coverage without leaving a "splotchy" appearance.

 This is the final stage of painting - I painted the uppermost surfaces of the flesh areas in 2:1 GW Dwarf Flesh/GW Elf Flesh at 1:4 paint/thinner consistency, with a careful application on all sharp fleshy edges. With some of the flatter raised areas, I tried to blend them somewhat into the underlying flesh color, as can hopefully be seen on the "collar" of the Spore Mine above the tentacles.

 Following a slight mishap in color selection, I decided to tidy up the gaps between all the bone plates. I mixed up 2:2 VGC Bonewhite/"bone wash," added a drop or two of thinner, and then carefully re-painted over all the gaps. As I was hoping, the Bonewhite in the mixture tidied up all the edges of the bone plates which had been highlighted up to pure Bonewhite, and the ink/dark paint/whatever in the bone wash darkened the bottom part of the gaps while neatly tidying up some of the rough edges on the plates themselves. Just for neatness' sake, while I had my jar of "bone wash" out, I put a tiny amount in the hole of each of the "tubes" sticking out of the business end of the Mine, just to darken 'em a little.