40K Friday - Of Necrons, Knights, and Backlogs ...

 

It's been a fairly slow summer here miniatures-wise but I am pushing forward. The weather finally cooperated enough to fall within a decent range for spraying for a few hours so my Necrons are almost all base coated now. With all of the models built (barring one older monolith) I am in the unfamiliar place of having an up-to-date fully-painted army with no backlog. It is a strange feeling as pretty much every other army I have inevitably has a shelf full of boxes, sprues, and in-progress units that seem to linger for years, never quite vanishing regardless of progress made. So yes, with this new approach for the Necrons I am hoping to change that and also to start applying it to my older armies. 

For one example I decided to make Imperial Knights a full army this edition and the backlog for them at this point consists of one larger knight and a group of 4-6 smaller knights. It -really- shouldn't take that long to build and paint 7 models, even larger models, and once they are done I don't really foresee a backlog developing there. 

I also ended up adding a Chaos Knight army but this one was largely pained, big knights and small knights alike, so I really just have some touch-up and base unification to do here so again no backlog and the army is playable as it is right now with one possible new knight to add to round out the force. Maybe not zero-backlog - but close!

I added a Custodes force for this edition too but they were also mostly painted so my backlog right now is repairing a unit that arrived broken into damn near every single component that could be glued together and then adding in a few standard bearers and one more sagittarum squad. So two units and a character or two - I think I'm getting the hang of this.

The Tyranids are a new from-scratch force for me and I want to paint them up in my own scheme so this is where most of my effort will be going. It's not really a backlog when you are just starting the army ... right? I'll have more to say about them over the next few months. 

With most of the new stuff in good shape and one new army waiting to begin the gaping hole in my current state is the Imperial backlog - beefing up the Crimson Fists with a bunch of newer Primaris stuff, major reinforcements to the Imperial Guard, and massive updates for the Black Templars ... this is probably where I should be spending my time but I suspect the Nids will jump in front of them. 

Anyway there's the ramble for this week. I may actually have to put up some pictures of these things as we move into fall. More to come for sure. 

40K Friday - Monday Edition - Necrons!

 

Remember those Necrons I was working on last year but didn't quite finish? Well, they are finally getting to a "finished" status now. Hey, it's only a year later than I was thinking ...

Of course now I am up against the same barriers I was last year - mainly the weather. It warmed up well enough here over the past week but it also rained much of the time so while I've been able to finish basing everything that I clear-coated earlier in the year I still have a chunk of the army making progress and then being set aside to wait for a warm-enough and dry-enough day to finally complete the process.

The idea here was to keep things simple - find a paint scheme I liked with a minimal number of steps so that I could get it done fairly quickly. I also did not want to go with the traditional "necron green" scheme which invalidated the easiest scheme of all: the one someone else has already put on some minis. I wanted to go with a Terminator-inspired look but I didn't really like the way that 80's glowy purple-blue you see from their guns looked when painted so I decided to focus on red - like their eyes. This ended up with a rule of red (Blood Angels Contrast Red to be exact) on the eyes and on the weapons and occasionally on sensors or some other markings. I've stuck this pretty closely.

The bodies needed to be silver of course and while I started with a chrome-ish look it just felt too shiny so I went with a more traditional silver, hit it with the red in the right spots, and then gave it all a heavy dose of Nuln Oil. Then I put a glossy spray clearcoat over the whole thing. This kept the silver look and added some shine but kept them from looking like they just rolled off of the lot. It also really brings out the details on these things. There are a ton of lines, panels, inscriptions, grooves, and nuance to these models and limiting the palette helps to emphasize them in my opinion.

I kept the basing fairly simple too. Desert sand color on the base, spreading some glue around over that, adding a tuft or two, and then dipping it in some fine-grained hobby sand ... and that's it! I had a vision early on of putting down a carpet of skulls like you see in some of the future shots in the Terminator movies but I could not get it to look the way I wanted so I stayed with a simpler desert scheme. I may put some skulls on some of the character and bigger model bases but I'm not doing it on the whole army. I also went back and forth on adding the somewhat traditional crystals to their bases. I have some on order now and I may dip a toe in it on the characters and such but I'm not sure every warrior and scarab needs a personal crystal on the base. 

Work in progress this week

It's about 3000 points now so I have some choices when setting up for a typical battle. I'm still considering expansion options - Lychguard? Immortals? Wraiths? More Destroyers? Flyers?  Not sure yet. Once I get this set finished I know the urge to expand will hit and there will be a "phase 2" expansion. 

40K Friday - Necrons Necrons Necrons

 

So this is the swore-I-wasn't-going-to-do-that army I mentioned in an earlier post. Since I went ahead and did it I thought I would try and get it built, painted, and up as a playable army this year, with Halloween as a sort of target date to play a first game ... being creepy undead robots and all. 

My biggest problem with starting a new army is sticking with it long enough to achieve that result because typically I start buying units and they end up in a partly finished state as new codexes come out and I get distracted finishing up "closer to completion" units for other armies. This year I did not want to do that.

The main considerations to achieve that goal are to get everything built, keep the paint scheme fairly simple, and keep the basing fairly simple too. So far ...

• Everything is built except for 20 out of the 60 warriors that will be the core of the force, a triarch stalker, and a canoptek doomstalker.
• Everything built is base coated with a silver spray that I like. 
• Basing materials have been acquired and await usage. 

This is all of the Indomitus stuff plus a few fun extras like a Command Barge and a Doomsday Ark. No old "rod" models here. 

I'm leaning towards a terminator type theme with these guys - shiny silver bodies (maybe with a blue tint), red eyes, sandy desert base with at least one skull on each base and maybe some tufts too. I'd like to put some ruined building bits on them too but they may just be for the bigger models as I don't want to complicate the scheme too much. 

I am not doing the traditional "green glow" thing with this army. It's cool and all but I want them to look different. Of course this means I can't really use any painted mini's I might come across so everything in this army will be done by me, for good or ill. 

Anyway that's the update so far. Once I get a chance to play with the eyes and figure out what I want to do with the guns I'll start cranking them out and sharing the progress in another update.