Armour has one job: be one colour, in good order, with a highlight along the edges. A swarm creature has no armour and no edges to speak of. It has zones. Learn to think in zones instead of a single scheme, and the same handful of paints will happily produce two completely different classic looks, or a dozen more of your own.

This is the one guide in the range that is not really about a colour. It is about an idea: that a living monster is built from parts with different jobs, and once you know what each part is for, you can swap the colours between them and still end up with something convincing. Get the anatomy right and the specific hue barely matters.

Nearly every swarm creature, however alien, breaks down into the same three zones. Learn to see them and every model in the army becomes the same painting problem.

The carapace. Hard, chitinous plate. Smooth, often glossy, and the zone that catches the most light. This is the zone that reads as "shell" to the eye, and it behaves a little like armour: it wants a base, a shade in its recesses, and a highlight on the ridges.

The flesh. Soft tissue between the plates, at joints, and across the underside. Duller than the carapace, often a completely different colour, and the zone that reads as "alive" rather than "armoured." It wants less contrast than the carapace, since living tissue does not catch light the way a hard shell does.

The bone. Claws, talons, spines and teeth. Almost always the palest element on the model regardless of what colour the carapace and flesh are, because bone reads as bone specifically by being lighter than everything around it.

Once a model is broken into these three zones, painting it becomes a matter of assigning a colour to each and executing the same three small routines. The specific colours are almost interchangeable. The zones are not.

Here is the part that surprises people the first time they see it done. Take a magenta for the carapace and a pale tone for the flesh, and you get one of the two classic swarm looks. Simply swap which zone gets which colour, a pale carapace and a deep red flesh, and you get the other. Same paints. Same method. Completely different creature.

Notice that the second look uses the same bone tone for both carapace and claws. That is deliberate, and it is one of the reasons it looks so different from the first: when carapace and bone match, the model reads as a single pale creature with one dark accent, rather than three distinct materials. The zones are the same. Which zone borrows which other zone's colour is the whole trick.

1. 1 Undercoat black. Every zone benefits from the same dark foundation. It is what lets a transparent ink shade sink convincingly into all three materials later, however different their final colours are.
2. 2 Base each zone in its assigned colour. Carapace first, since it usually covers the most surface area. Flesh into the joints and undersides. Bone across claws, talons and teeth. Do not worry about tidy borders between zones yet, the ink in the next step will help disguise any overlap.
3. 3 Shade the carapace and the flesh with different inks. This is the one place the two zones genuinely diverge in technique. The carapace wants a shade close to its own hue, so a magenta carapace takes a purple ink and a bone carapace takes a brown one. The flesh, whichever colour it is, almost always benefits from a warm red-toned ink, since living tissue reads convincingly with a hint of blood beneath the surface regardless of its base colour.
4. 4 Highlight the carapace hard, the flesh softly. The carapace is a hard reflective surface and can take a genuinely bright, confident highlight along its ridges, the same way you would edge-highlight armour. The flesh is soft tissue and wants a gentler transition, closer to a blend than a sharp edge, or it starts looking like plate instead of skin.
5. 5 Bring the bone up to white. Base, a deep shade in the pits and serrations, then push the highlight all the way to white on the very tips of claws and teeth. Bone reads as bone specifically because of this pale extreme; stopping the highlight halfway leaves it looking like just another mid-tone colour.
6. 6 Add the mouth last. A wet pink or red in any visible mouth, tongue or membrane. This is the smallest area on the model and the one a viewer's eye goes to first. It is worth doing carefully even when everything else was fast.

Once the three zones are second nature, the two recipes above stop being the only options. Try a green carapace with grey flesh for something closer to a beetle. Try keeping the carapace and bone the same pale tone but pushing the flesh toward orange instead of red. The zones do the structural work of making the creature read correctly. The specific hues are yours to choose once you understand what each zone is doing and why.

• Shading every zone with the same ink. The carapace and the flesh want different undertones. Matching them flattens the contrast that makes a creature read as multiple materials rather than one uniform colour.
• Highlighting flesh as hard as carapace. A crisp edge highlight on soft tissue reads as armour plate, not skin. Keep it soft.
• Stopping the bone highlight too early. Bone needs to reach genuinely pale, close to white, or it just looks like a fourth mid-tone colour rather than bone.
• Painting the mouth first. It is the focal point of the model. Save your sharpest attention for last, when your hand and your patience are both still fresh enough to do it justice.
• Assuming the carapace colour has to be dramatic. A quiet, desaturated carapace with a vivid flesh tone underneath can look just as striking as the reverse. Do not feel obliged to make the shell the loud part.