Necrons Rebooted -- New materials, new techniques

Hey there,

while my old Necrons were all done in the "traditional" tabletop/GW way with conventional brush painting, the new Necrons will benefit from the newest and "best" materials and techniques out there, as it should be expected for such a superior race! ;-)

All of this was actually triggered by the Black Friday sales, where fantastic hobby companies like GreenStuffWorld and AK Interactive had some nice offers in the online shops. Always curious for trying out new stuff, I ordered quite a selection of products from both.
For the Necron project, in particular the Xtreme Metal colours from AK Interactive were the main trigger.

I was curious if with colours like the Chrome one could indeed get realistic polished metal effects, i.e., the so-called mirror effect. Here an airbrush is of course absolutely critical. Once I started playing around with it (and I can tell you it needs a bit of testing until I understood how these colours should be used and what is most important), I felt the urge to test these colours with a suitable miniature project. And what would be better suited than the Necrons...

After a few tests on spoons and plastic pieces, I found it particularly matching to honour the first Necron model ever (from the venerable Space Crusade boardgame) to be the first Necron model to be painted with these new colours.

I actually found this model by chance while looking for through my bits box for suitable test pieces, so a real strike of destiny!!

I am quite happy with the "shinyness" of the metal, although it is not easy to convey in photos. Thus, here a comparison with one of my old GW-metal-brush-painted Necron warriors:

And this is the fully painted Necron Warrior:

BTW, the green glow is as well achieved with a new product, namely the Fluorescent Lime Green fron GreenStuffWorld over a white undercoat. Of course, the "glowing" effect of this colour is also difficult to convey in photos.


At the same time, I wanted to try out the Blue Stuff and Acrylic Resin from GreenStuffWorld.

And since my mind was already geared towards Necrons, it was an obvious idea to try both for mass-producing Scarabs!

In the above picture you can see the first such simple (one-sinded) mold that I made with the blue stuff to do 12 Scarabs at the same time, as well as two of the resulting acrylic resin Scarabs.

Next, I made molds for the smaller Scarabs from the Tesseract Vault box. These I fixed with a little UHU Patafix in a tray (as you can see above on the right corner) before pressing in the Blue Stuff from above. The advantage of doing the in a transparent tray was that I could see where there was still air around the Scarabs from the underside:

And then correct for it accordingly by pressing more in the right places...

Finally, here some finished Scarabs as well with the new colours:

BTW, one of the five non-classic Scarabs above is an Acrylic Resin copy. Guess which one is it! ;-)

I plan to make some posts with more details about these new materials (and also the many others I bought) in the near future, so stay tuned.

Happy experimenting!!!

Necrons Rebooted -- The old masters awake again...

Humans! Kneel down with your weak flesh corpses! To the dust! Here come to true and rightful masters of the Galaxy, the ones who extinguished the Old Ones and oppressed the C'Tan. We are the Necrons, and we are legion!

Already many years ago, I recognised the might of the Necrons and decided to devote myself to them (at least partly in addition to the primordial annihilator and the Hivemind ;-)).  You can find my old Necrons by clicking on the corresponding keyword on the right (or here; and scrolling down to the older articles). However, after a short period of frenzied activity,  my Necrons dissappeared again to their stasis chambers and let Chaos troops and Underhive gangs freely roam on my painting and gaming tables.

But now, it is truly time for the Necrons to awake from their hibernation and return to take back what is rightfully theirs!

It all started with a weak electromagnetic pulse originating deep under the crust of the Imperial industrial world of Soton III. The pulse was so weak that even the most advanced sensors of the Adeptus Mechanicus barely detected something and signal adept Rho-56/13 dismissed it after short analysis with a 2.6112 sigma significance, calculating that with a probability of 73.5744 % the signal to originate from a natural source like a fluke in the magnetic core of the planet.

However adept Rho-56/13's conclusion although logical was wrong. The pulse was originating 43 kilometer underneath the surface of the uninhabited Solent valley, in a well secured stasis chamber.
It belonged to an ultra-short energy spike that started a fully automated reboot protocol, which in turn was initialized after a quantum countdown started many aeons ago came to its end. Shortly after there were the first mechanical movements in the chamber and a multiplicator machine restarted its production chain. If there camera signal of the chamber would have been accessible to the Imperials on the surface, they would have seen:

Shortly after that the Lord himself was awakened again and took over the control of the major strategical neural network to supervise and manipulate the default procedures according to his personal preferences. One of these steps was to review to different Necron troop models that were developed some 60 thousand years ago during the early stages of the biomachine transformation of his race:

In order to make his optimum choices, he takes into account the information about the new parasite that has befallen his planet during his rest.

The autonomous tomb defence machines had gathered some biological remains of this parasite that allowed a full genetical analysis showing all its weaknesses and thus the best strategies to exterminate it quickly. The Lord was in fact mildly surprised at the success of this parasite given its many and fatal obvious weaknesses. These suggested that reclaiming  the tomb world would be all to easy but his thousands of years of experience with parasite control told him that he was still missing some information.

Therefore, he decided that it was safer to also reboot and re-instate some of the old elite units that had served him so well in many occasions:

Soon, the machine bodies would be rebooted and ready for the download of Necron minds. Then, it would be time for a thorough cleansing of the Tomb World and its sister planets...

Blackstone Fortress Chaos Troops Size Comparison

Greetings to all the super accurate miniature lovers out there!

 I guess most of us agree that the new Blackstone Fortress Box miniatures are awesome sculpts (with lots of conversion potential).

However, those how have visited my blog before, know that I have a weakness for accurate scales (e.g., true scale), and I thus I could not resist to first take some comparison shots of the new Chaos Space Marines and Heretic Imperial troops with their loyalist peers and older versions of themselves.

As you can see below the new Chaos Space Marine models are indeed slightly taller than the old (e.g., Dark Vengeance) brethren but still slightly shorter than Primaris height.

Also the heretic troops are taller than e.g., the Cadian but fortunately not as tall as the new Delaque (what was GW thinking?!).

Welcome to the junkyard! -- The birth of a new custom Necromunda gang -- The Junkers

Underhivers!

End of last year I had a very productive visit at my partner in crime on our common Necromunda project. Totally inspired by the new Necromunda miniatures, our creative minds went on overdrive, and after the creation of the Toxic Slag Miner gang being almost complete, we already had the next powerful idea:

Looking at the new Cawdor models, we saw trash... piles of junk and a bunsh of crazy guys living in between them. Visions of the new Mad Max and Walking Dead flooded us. So this is what came out of the creative chaos (work in progress of course):

For now, I call them shamelesslly "The Junkers". Above, you can see the (yet nameless) leader (guess which one it is ;-)), and two of his sla... eh "helpers" (the latter created by my friend).

The idea is that the leader is really massive (evidently) but NOT a stupid brute! This is why he actually has an (Orlock) spear cannon....


Next up is the (to become) crazy tech of the gang, the dude who builds things and keeps things functioning...

As you can see, he still needs to find some cloths (which I later started to model in Green stuff). His most prominent tool is his BIG mechanical eye, which allows him to efficiently find useful things among all the trash, like the flamer pistol he is carrying (hell yeah, the guy IS dangerous!).

And here the family portrait so far with "The Medic" (credits to my buddy, in particular for drilling out almost the whole pox walker buddy from underneath this pretty coat -- with a Dremel of course ;-))

TO BE CONTINUED....

Paintdesk upgrade: Airbrush booth

One of my new years resolutions: cleaner air in the hobby room (and for my lungs)! It was high time to install an air brush booth to soak up the airbrush fumes (in addition to a mask of course), and for a while now there are out of the box solutions available in the inter webs. I know that it would be quite easy to build one on your own but I want to safe more time for actual painting of minis! ;-)


That said, I went to good old Ebay and bought and airbrush booth, namely the new version of the Haosheng HS-E420 in black and with LED lights integrated:

Which can be obtained here in the UK: https://bartsharp.co.uk/index.php/airbrush-spray-booths/e420-dc-portable-airbrush-spray-booth-178.html
In the end, I had to slightly modify it to fit underneath my monitor but I am quite happy with the solution:

Now when I airbrush, I open the window (tilt) and put the exhaust hose on the side at the opening.


I have to say that 45db is louder than I was hoping. So do not expect to be able to listen to audiobooks on the loud speakers while airbrushing (I guess I could try the headphone on top of my mask ;-))


Happy brushing everybody!!

Necromunda Custom Gang -- First Toxic Slag Miner painted

This is the prototype for the colour scheme of our custom-made Necromunda Gang, the Toxic Slag Miners. Imagine a yellow rubber body suit to work in toxic environments.

And now imagine wearing it for weeks continuously... yeah, that's it, grim Dark!

Tooth & Claw -- Genestealer Abominant vs Haldor Icepelt

Hi again,


I love the new Genestealer Cult miniatures that GW has been releasing recently. And the Genestealer Abominant from the Tooth & Claw boxed set is a particular beauty!!! Actually the main reason why I could not resist buying the box. :-))))


Not surprisingly, the sculpt is also a great please to paint!

For the color scheme, I imagine some more "natural" human miner taint colour for the skin, i.e, pale., while the mutated "skin" should be more insect carapace (or Alien movie) like, i.e, gloss black...

Now the duel with Haldor Icepelt can begin!

Who will win???

X-Wing -- My first repaint -- Red 5

Happy new year to all you hoppy slavers out there!

My 2018 ended quite busy with a lot of work, travel and the holidays and 2019 started with some serious illness. Thus,  a little blogging hole has opened which now I aim to close by posting some stuff that I did end of last year but didn't manage to post:

First off, something slightly different than the Grim Dark:

In honour of the X-Wing Miniatures Game 2. Edition (which is an absolute blast!) I decided to repaint my first X-Wing miniature ever.

And which could be better suited than the most iconic space ship of all: Luke Skywalker's T65 X-Wing Designation: Red 5!

After spending a few hours searching the internet for the best reference pictures, I set off. I used the new T65 from the 2nd Edition Core Box.

First, I replaced the ugly massive transparent basing rod with something sleeker:

 And here is the result of just a few hours of easy-going repainting:

for the engine exhausts, I tried some new colours, namely the fluorescent paints from Vallejo, here a mix of the magenta and some orange. They are indeed fluorescent but you do not really see it in the photos...

And finally, and quick comparison with the 1.Edition T65:

May the force be with you!!!!