Necrons Rebooted -- Inspiration & Vision

Earthlings!

Today, I would like to share a little bit about my sources of inspiration and the resulting vision for my Necron army.

First of, I have to say that I am a huge fan of the earlier fluff introduced in the venerable

Necron Codex for the 3rd Edition of Warhammer 40k:

And, I started my Necron collection at the time of the 4th Edition when the above codex was still the current one. I was a big fan of the mysterious and silent killer machines coming out of nowhere and just eliminating everything without mercy.

They reminded me of the Terminator movies  which would be one of the major sources of inspiration, in particular the future scenes in Terminator 2:

I will never forget the above scene. Such a powerful image!

And then the terminators themselves:

So we gather from the above:
- relentless machines
- cold bare metal
- piercing red glowing eyes
- crushed skulls

These themes I had to incorporate into my Necrons! I think there are really many beautiful color schemes out there for Necrons that go away from the "boring" bare metal look, or that apply heavy aging like rust to make the models look more interesting. While I appreciate these, in my vision the Necrons use superior metal alloys that do not rust of age (and are constantly regenerated, i.e., the living metal!). Surely, the Necrons use the best metals in the Galaxy!   

Non-metal materials like ceramics and plastics would also be possible but I reserve those for the Tau and stick with the metal theme for the Necrons.

So this fully defines the color scheme for my Necrons, shinny (like new) metal, red eyes and green glowing weapons as on the first artworks of the Necrons. Just to make the metal look a bit more intersting, I decided to add some blue hues into it, which could also emphasise its alloy/exoctic nature. And finally, I like the GW idea of using some power circuit like symbols on the elite units to  distinguish them visually from the rest.

But then, the Necrons do not only have humanoid/skeletal warriors, the second big theme is insect-like machines (for low level tasks), and here the main inspiration is as well a movie series of course: The Matrix triology:

Namely the sentinels (shown above)! Here the main aspect for me are the many surveying eyes, something which all my non-humanoid Necrons should become. On the other hand, the tentacles is something  that I will probably reserve for a future Dark Mechanicus army... ;-)

OK, I admit that the above vision is kind of the obvious (and probably what also inspired the GW designers). So surely not very creative but, despite obvious and mainstream, I find it just too cool too not realize this vision.

Finally, GW (or Matt Ward) decided during the 5th Edition that the Necrons would need more and new fluff and decided to make them into basically Egyptian Tomb Kings in Space (You can read all about this ancient history in the extremely entertaining essay on 1d4chan). I don't want to rant here about GW or this move, so let's just say I am not a fan of this new fluff and some of the resulting miniature design. So naturally, I will remove most of it in my own Necron army with little conversions. It is true that also the 3rd Edition Necrons had a few Egyptian things (e.g., Scarabs, the monolith), and I am happy to keep it at this level.
The above means that all the new Necron character models are unacceptable for me, which gives me the amazing opportunity to design and realise my own characters...

Let me finish off this post with some really cool and inspiring artworks of Necrons, many of these are coming from the amazing https://40k.gallery/, others from  https://www.instagram.com/warhammerart/  The rest is wildly collected from the internet (and probably violating some copyright, my apologies!).