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!!!