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!).

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?!).