Bit of a change of direction at the moment. I'm painting up a small Necron army for 40K. The main reason is so that I can play some games against George's Eldar. I really don't want this project to derail my historical projects and thats the reason I ended up choosing Necrons since a quick scan through the various 40K armies gave me the idea that they were probably the quickest to paint up.
I put some thought into a Necron colour scheme and was originally hoping to be able to do something a bit different to the normal metallic fare. My first thoughts were to paint them up Egyptian style with bodies of stone and bronze. I knocked up a test figure (see left) but it took me too long to paint. I am a
really slow painter. So this wasn't going to work without putting my AWI armies back a year.....
So I've gone back to a standard Necron metallic scheme. They're going to be steel coloured, but dirty and rusty. I'm going to concentrate on a few small areas to detail and do the rest of the figures as quickly as I can. The main point of detailing will be to paint the Gauss rods. I'm not happy with the garish translucent rods as they come out of the box and so I'm going to do a variegated electricity pattern on them (I had a go of this on the tester model). My other area of concentration will be bases. I want to do some Giants Causeway style rock formations, so i've ordered some hexagonal plastic rods and we'll see whether I can knock up anything that looks reasonable.
Okay so now I've got the main force of warriors assembled. Before moving on, I really need to have a moan. I
hate sticking plastic figures together and these were no exception.
Two main points of irritation for me;
Firstly the skulls are connected to the sprues by two joins, one under each cheekbone. That makes it impossible to snip off cleanly and finger-stabbingly difficult to then trim using a craft knife.
Secondly - it seems you need at least 15 fingers to hold the arms in place when glueing them together. In the end though, I managed to find a sequence that worked;
- Put glue in the socket holes not the socket balls. Put a blob in each shoulder socket and one in the gun socket.
- Put the left arm into the gun socket and hold for about 10-15 seconds so that it holds in place but is still flexible.
- Now attach the gun/arm assembly to both shoulders. It should just about hold itself together as you position the arms.
- Hold it for a few seconds until it can support itself
- Curse GW and then move onto the next one
So, next step, painting......
Right, my secret weapon in speed painting has been deployed. Army Painter Plate Metal primer spray. So in only a couple of minutes they are primed and painted in the base colour. If only they did a 10mm tartan spray to do AWI Highlanders. From now on though it's all downhill speedwise..... I'm to be doing a series of washes to bring out the detail and add a general dirty rustiness to them. When I've had a go, then I'll post some more pics in Part 2.
