Regular visitors will know that I have a company-sized force of Astagar: the sci-fi snake-types from what was Critical Mass Games but now available from Ral Partha Europe.

I’m always looking to add to my sci-fi collection, so when browsing the Trilaterum website I was pleased to see that one of the factions, the Parici, also had a set of snake-types with guns. Very different from the Astagar, but still distinctly serpentes.

Slight problem in that Trilaterum only deliver to their native United States, but a bit of ingenuity later I had a couple of squads of Reavers in my hand ready to be painted.

These were so easy to paint that I managed to do all of them, from undercoating to final varnish, in one day.

The Reavers come in two parts: the main body and a separate head, with three different head types included (plus plenty of spares). You have a standard closed-mouth head, a closed-mouth tongue projecting head, and a snarling mouth open head.

As I was going to be using Contrast Paints, I began with an undercoat in GW Grey Seer. I prefer Grey Seer to the White: although you get slightly bolder colours with the white, it does show through up more if you miss a bit.

Start with the belly: Skeleton Horde. Don’t worry about staying in the lines, just slop it on.

Next is the war-harness. I used Snakebite Leather for this: it seemed appropriate! You need to be reasonably careful with this colour i.e. try not to get too much on the actual Reaver. Note that the harness fastens at the front onto a sort of breastplate, so you need to paint that bit too.

Now the best bit: the main snake skin. I used Creed Camo for this, but the Trilaterum site has the Reavers painted with a yellow colour and, in fact, almost any colour would do. They are aliens, after all.

Do be careful when painting the snake skin next to where it hits the Bleached Bone belly. I found the best technique was to outline the belly both sides before painting the rest of the main torso.

After that, it was just finishing off by painting the guns and the eyes in Black Templar, the two fangs in (standard acrylic) white, and the tongue (where it shows) using Warp Lightning. Where I had used snarling mouth open heads, I painted the inside of the mouth (including the side jaw webbing) in Hexwraith Flame (paint the mouth first before anything else).

I also painted the spikes on the war-harness in a standard acrylic bronze colour. I was considering having one or two with silver spikes as squad leader types but, in the end, didn’t bother. I’ll be looking out for a Big Man figure where I can find one.

So that’s a two-squad platoon of Reavers added to the Astagar, rapidly becoming one of my favourite armies to field.