*shing!* This is the brand new Norn Emissary Kit, and I'm
going to find out today just how big it is as I build it. I'm Murray, and it's Tabletop Time. So Games Workshop has sent us all
these new kits in the brand new Tyranid range, but Murray has dibs on the Norn Emissary. So once Murray is done with his conversion, we're
going to go ahead and check out some of these really cool boxes. And show you what's inside, but we
better get this Norn Emissary over to Murray. During this spectacular reveals that we had
earlier this year of the battleline units of the Tyranid army, we got this beauty, the Norn Emissary, or Assimilator. Resembling a Hive Tyrant in all but name,
these big creatures lead your armies to victory. And there's been a little bit of contention and
questioning among the community exactly how big are these? They were described as
being taller than an Eldar Wraithlord. There's some sources saying that
they'd be nearly the size of an Imperial Knight. Let them fight. And well, we've got a wealth
of superimposed images that sleuths on the internet have tried to
deduce just how tall these monsters are. But how accurate are these images really? Can a banana truly be used
as a controlled unit of measurement? Well today, hopefully, I'll answer
this universal quandary once and for all. No, I'm not going to find the median length of a banana. I'm going to build this kit and
have a little bit of kit bashing with it to forever answer just how
tall it is by the additions I put on it. Let's go! Upon opening up the box, I'm
confronted with two very tightly packed sprues. These look fantastic. And what I feel is quite a large scale instruction manual. Usually they're about half the size of this. But for a large kit, I appreciate this. However, one thing I want to immediately comment upon
is that all of these pieces are really nice, big and chunky. I love seeing that on a sprue. Getting lots of tiny little pieces
that have to come apart and clip together really awkwardly and is really
fiddly is a huge annoyance to me personally. As is more or less standard with Games Workshop
kits these days, the mould lines are almost invisible. Even with these organic flowing lines, they're really
easy to get rid of and otherwise just pretty easy to hide. One thing that did leap to mind
while I was constructing this is that it actually felt less like a
Warhammer kit and more like a Gunpla kit. And that these big items just sort of clipped
onto each other, overlapping and obscuring the last one. Like you're building a big mech. I suppose technically this may as well be a big mech. A big fleshy mech. And it was extremely satisfying to have all the
pieces click together nicely as they slotted into place. Now that I've prepped all the main components to
construct the body, it's time to put them all together. Except where is the middle piece gone? Ah, there it is. Cheeky little blighters. And as you can see here, the
little Termagaunt is sitting entirely upon the big chitinous frill
that is the head of the Norn Emissary. And now we simply slot all the arms into the body. I'll take that. And that one. Thank you. Then the large base going together. It really is nice to have a huge scenic base for something. Now it's time to show off our monster. And here we have it. He's all constructed and he looks glorious. However, I don't want to leave it just here. As cool as this model is in its completely
vanilla pose, I want to add just a little something. Namely, a little dead something. We still have the sprue of the Ballisticus
Dreadnought that came in the Leviathan box set. Well, I'm gonna make use of it. There was this amazing conversion
that was in the Chaos Codex at the time. It was this Daemon Prince holding
aloft the remains of the pilot of a Dreadnought, bloody and pulped in one raised hand as the rest of the
shell of the Dreadnought lay broken and tattered at his feet. It was a brilliantly made model and an
absolute influence on me for the rest of the hobby. In fact, Dave and I refer to
this model quite a lot from time to time. And right here right now, I want to try and
replicate this with the new Norn Emissary model. So it's time to pull out the
Dreadnought and do a little bit of kit-bashing. *musics* So I've just finished building the destroyed Dreadnought, and it's time to glue it onto the
base and sort of sculpt that up around to show the impact of the
Dreadnought falling onto the ground, you know. Very cinematic event. However, the next stage in this conversion is that
we are going to need a dead pilot from the Dreadnought, and I'm going to re-sculpt the Norn
Emissary's hand, sort of flip it around so it's palm up, gently cup the deceased
pilot, claws digging into it, and all sorts of horrible fluids
dripping down into the now empty sarcophagus. So it's going to be my next stage of the
project, and I'm going to split the workload. I'm going to work on the Dreadnought body, while
Dave is enlisted to work on the Dreadnought's actual body. Yeah, let me finish putting
transfers on the Cities of Sigmar first. [Laughter] So it's time to take a look at all the other
Tyranid kits, and I actually got the Neurolictor. I grabbed this and painted it up at home, because
I was so excited to paint my first ever Tyranid model, and you can have a look at that here. The box went together really well, but a
single sprue inside my box for $77 or something. It's a very cool model. It's very impactful. Yeah, I'll show you the other ones next. Speaking of the Death Leaper, we have the Death Leaper. But this is actually a
reimagination of an old Tyranid character. It looked like this, and now it looks like this. Murray and I both were excited
to grab these kits and tackle into them. So unfortunately, we were very clever and
didn't film any of the opening or anything like that, because we did paint them at home. But it's time to look at
something I'm interested in, the Genestealers. And let's open them up. Genestealers to me have always been
both iconically 40k and also hideously ugly. So I'm interested to see in person what they look like. We got three sprues, 32 mil bases, instructional
pamphlet, two legs, four arms, heads, it's all there. I feel like the classic, the iconic Genestealer paint job, just kind of-like, no negative to the painters. They painted it well. But the actual paint scheme I think is
really boring and doesn't show off all of the detail. These are quite cool. There's a lot more going on on
these limbs than I think I thought there was. I actually think I prefer the
other variant that kind of looks like Cthulhu. I think that they're way cooler than the
old Genestealers, which to me, kind of lame. They look like the Ood from Doctor Who. Yes. Remember Doctor Who. Yes, they do. We've got dynamic mounts, but really, I
would love to see these Genestealers painted up in not the Leviathan scheme, because there's a
lot more detail on these models than you can sort of see in these paint schemes
where they're just painted white. I will say in a few areas, the way the
casting has been done makes it look like the claws are actually webbed feet because the plastic kind
of glues them together rather than being independent and splayed, which is a little bit peculiar, I must say. But beyond that, it looks awesome and
is definitely a big upgrade for a classic kit. So next up, we have the Biovore. And this previous model that existed was pretty darn ugly. And I have to say, this is a huge upgrade. So let's open up and have a little look. This kit came with one and a half sprues
in it, and it looks like there's some pretty cool stuff on here. We can see three of the
Sporemines, and they've had a bit of a redesign. So they're looking pretty cool. They're actually pretty big. They're substantially larger than Sporemines. I remember Sporemines being
like, euuugh, not even an inch tall. But these are probably, what? They're as large as a Primaris Space Marine in height, easily. I'd say they're probably one
and a half inches, for you Americans. And this is the size base that he comes on. - So he's like about the size I would expect him to be.
- 60 mil. 80 mil base, and they're on 25. Yeah.
I think this guy has a ton of detail on him. I can see some of really gnarly veins,
and it looks a little bit gross in some places, but in a cool way, I guess. So all the legs insert with kind of like peg attachments. So if you wanted to give it a more dynamic
or different pose, you would have to carve that off, which is a bit odd because there's so much
room to hide a ball joint in the carapace of this model. I find it strange that they went for
these one pose options for the way it connects, probably so the details more seamless. It would be interesting to see how
much poseability people would actually have. So if you got like four of them, you
don't want their legs in exactly the same position. I kind of want to see one, you know,
like from Zelda where they got the spiders that kind of like face downwards. I kind of want to see it like bum up. That could be really interesting. See what you can do out there, converters. We don't got time. Lastly, we have the Lictor We did also get sent the Hormogaunts kit, but Murray snaffled it up immediately
because he's been waiting for them for ages and we now don't have it. It's gone. The Lictor!! Now this Lictor looks quite poseable
just from the back of the box, which is very cool. The Lictor is actually a
model I've really liked for a long time. This is a standalone solo model you get in the box. It's not in a squad. This box is a single Lictor. We have one full size sprue of which
there's a lot of little gubbins and a lot of highly detailed parts, which we've
come to expect from the Tyranid range. I'd say it's a lot larger than the
previous Lictor iteration was with, I mean, this claw is like two inches long just for its top talon. Three.
There's three distinct poses in this box for the legs. And then you have what looks like a lot
of poseability on the claws and how they attach, which is really cool. Yeah. That means with the claws up top, the
arm positioning and the leg poses, you should be able to make a bunch of cool combos. And you'll probably even with some
clever terrain building, be able to mix and match the legs as well. See, because the legs just attached to the torso. So you'll be able to use like this
left leg and that right leg, probably, although they won't sit flat. So you need to build some interesting terrain. This is cool. I like the Lictor. This is probably my second favourite in the kit. The Neurolictor was my favorite. So that's the boxes. There's the close ups. You've seen the sprues. You've seen them in hand. What did you think? It's time to get back to Murray. *It's Musicbreak Time* *Just riffing on It's Tabletop Time* For all my Tyranids, I prime and base
coat my miniatures with aerosols, both to save myself time and also to get a nice
gradient between a lively red undertone and the blue that is the basis of my colour scheme. *montage* Ah, yes. Murray has left me with his
precious model to make some strange adjustments. Yes. Time for me to prize a space marine from
the torso of this dreadnought with just a little bit of converting. We actually have this little man, this
little dude, this little operator guy who has been kicking around and slowly had
pieces sliced off him, removed from various models. All that was left is this torso
that we never really knew what we'd do with. And he'd make the perfect foundation for
a heavily damaged Space Marine in a sarcophagus. This conversion was super simple. All I did is grab this, attach a Space
Marine head, and then clip all of the fingers on this Norn Emissary and then re-bend them
around so it looks like it's holding firmly, nastily grasping this Space Marine, this poor guy. And once that was done, I green stuffed
all the knuckles to fix them up and just left a couple of tubly danglies, which Murray can
paint as organs, blood, viscera, or just electrical cables to give the image that this
Norn Emissary has torn this poor, poor Space Marine from the tum-tum of this Dreadnought. Then I also quickly just throw on a
Space Bear shield and hacked together a little bit of Grilliput fur so that
Dreadnought would look a little bit more bearish. That time the Tyranids got
a win against these Space Marines. Is this foreshadowing for our Battle Report results? You decide. Alright, time to start painting. I'm going to go through this part of the
video fairly quickly, but if you'd like to see a real in-depth dive into how I paint each and every
stage of my Tyranids, check out one of my dedicated painting videos on this channel. Links are in the description. However, that's not to say I
won't give you the brief gist of it. Having established this really nice blue
zenithal over the entire model, I'm going to go and start painting all the chitin. Now, for painting all this bony armour, I'm
going to use an overbrushing technique, which is really just a way of making the brush glide over all
of the textures, leaving some of the colours in the recesses. So I'm going to start with the dark bluey
grey colour, and then once I'm fairly happy with the coverage and the nice scratchy texture I get
from painting like this, I'm going to move on to the next colour, namely a skin colour, which will
give a really nice pearlescence using the exact same technique as before, but applying it
slightly lighter and more sparing so I don't cover as much area, I'm going to put this paint
down, focusing even more on getting a really nice texture in areas. Then I'll keep going back and forth, applying
more and more of this paint to build up the colour in certain areas around the edges. While I'm painting all these areas of the
carapace, I'm not worrying at all about painting over some of these brainy areas, in fact I'm going to
make sure I get them entirely, as painting them up with nice bright colours will be really
beneficial for putting washes and contrast paints over them later. Now having done that, it's time to do the markings. I'm going to paint nice big angry
triangles of orange, and then fill them in with a dark charcoal. This in particular is inspired by real
world insect life, and all the markings you can find on their wings. Okay, I've stolen Murray's WIP Tyranid, and it's time to answer the big question: everyone wants to know, which is:
"How big is it?" We've seen some pictures, but photography
can be deceptive, so it's time for us to show you for real. As soon as the Norn Emissary was
described as towering over a Wraithlord, alarm bells started ringing for me. I didn't think it would be very big. A lot of people were hyped for a Norn
Emissary when rumours were going around that it was going to be like Knight-sized. It's not. But let's find out how big it is. Jen and I have got some models to compare it to. So this is an Eldar Wraithlord. I painted this a really long time
ago, so please don't look at the paint job. But you can see here, yeah, he is
a little bit taller than a Wraithlord. But is he taller than some other models that we have? If a Wraithlord is, you know,
almost as tall as him, but quite a lot smaller, what about the smallest of Imperial Knights? A Knight Armiger. Based on the same size, you can see that
the Norn Emissary is quite a bit bigger and more vicious looking. But really, we're already starting to see
that not by a massive amount, a little Armiger is not that much smaller than a Norn Emissary. So I have an Avatar of Khaine from Forgeworld. Now it's a pretty big model, but
how big is it compared to the Norn Emissary? Coming in just slightly taller
than Dave's Armiger is the Avatar of Khaine. It's looking pretty impressive for now, but
I think that there's something that might top it. So everyone was hyped that this would
be the big beastie, the plastic model that puts Tyranids on the map as having a massive
monster capable of going toe to toe with the biggest models in Warhammer 40K. Well, it could go toe to toe with an Avatar. That looks like a duel. What about a real Knight? As you can see, the Norn Emissary is
starting to look a little bit less than impressive in my mind. I think it's going to have its work cut out
for it, trying to take down this giant Chaos Knight. And this is only the regular pattern of Chaos Knight. There's multiple taller and bigger Knights available. In fact, when we're talking largest plastic kits in ranges, how do the Tyranids fare against the Orks? Uh, as you can see, the largest plastic
kits in Warhammer 40K dwarf the Norn Emissary. It really isn't as big as, well,
I think many of us thought it might be. It's kind of, it's just a baby. It's just a baby! So we hoped you like seeing an accurate
size comparison of this model next to a whole bunch of others. There's no doubt it's a really cool,
impressive kit for the Tyranid range, but it's no Knight and it's no Stompa. For the next stage I like to go with a
really strong pink contrast, and just go over all of the fleshy areas in between all the limbs. This will give a really nice soft fleshy appearance. And once that's dry, I'll also highlight
it to give this really nice wet glossy appearance that'll really communicate soft flesh. And then in complete contrast to the soft
areas, it's time to do all the sharp talons and claws. And for this I'm going to use a really dark
blue, and then start mixing in successive shades of a strong jade colour, and it creates an
absolutely striking appearance on all of the sharp talons and teeth. For the brain on the Norn Emissary, I
decided that I'd try and replicate a very strong ethereal blue that the official artwork is showing off. I did a sort of ruddy red on my Neurotyrant, and I think it just blended maybe a bit too much into the red undertones I already had. a small highlight of white, it's time
to work on the fallen nemesis, the dreadnought. I've been painting for a while now and
as usual, I've lost track of the time and I am seriously hungry. Luckily, I have just the thing to hit the spot. (whooshing) Tabletop time merch. We have a range of
apparel that will fill up your stomach and your shopping cart, including our brand
new shirt, Insatiable Hunger. I've actually ordered one for myself. For me, it's coming, it's mine. So slay your enemies on the tabletop and with your fine looks. But now it's time to
go back to painting the nought and the serie and
all the fun little details that are on the new model. Now what I'm gonna do
here is give it a nice dry brush of gray, which will
give me all the highlights on these metal panels,
which I can then go through and use a contrast and
treat it like I'm doing a bit of a slap chop method. This will bring all the colors down and create that nice space bears vibe. And then after I've
done all the metals and details, of course I cannot forget
to do the streaking grime effect. Now for the pilot themselves, they'll get pretty
much the same treatment as all the fleshy areas on the Tyranid, albeit with a good amount
of Blood for the Blood God applied all over the model. Now, once I finished
pulling back all the streaking grime effects, it's time to put
a bit of a dry brush on the base Then once I've done
the final highlights painting in the eyes of the
Emissary, it's time to assemble all the bits together
and have some grand reveals. (dramatic music) I wanna say a massive
shout out to all our patrons. Without your support, we
could not put out two videos a week. Without your support, we
could not put out two videos a week. That's crazy talk. And it's through your combined support that we are able to
make such amazing things. If you have a burning
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to sign up, the links are in the description below. Thank you for watching
until the end of the video. As we had a little
exploration looking at all the new kits, built one up, painted it, converted it, and had my own little personal homage to a really cool old Golden Demon entry. Until the next release. *dies*
