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.
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| 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.
