Hobby Progress for Week 1

Week One of the Necron painting project went fantastically, with 10 Immortals (minus basing) finished and 6 Destroyers! Even I was surprised how fast I got these guys done with the few hours I could dedicated to them. I also felt like my plans to get a unified looking army regardless of Dynasty were right on track. 

So how did I paint these models? Well I started out with setting up my assembly line and having all my paints ready. I made sure to avoid time consuming escapades, like paint mixtures and dilutions, as only Lahmian Medium for glazing and pesky recces filling would be necessary. The first miniatures I chose were the Immortals and Destroyers for very important reasons.

The Destroyers presented great flat surfaces to see what range of bronze to gold I wanted to go with for the Nephrekh. The Immortals presented the same with how red to orange I wanted to go with the Novokh. Also, by focusing on units from each Dynasty it would force me to make decisions on what unifying colors/themes would be needed to bring the two Dynasties coherently together.

To help with this I turned to a familiar source to get me started…

Like most Warhammer community painting videos you get good basic schemes for painting your models, and as someone who is just looking for tabletop+ quality this can be invaluable in making sure not to waste time testing out different ideas. As for the final result I held close to Chris’s Nephrekh suggestions, but leaned more towards gold over bronze and left the side vents metallic silver. In the case of the Novokh Immortals I decided to use about half of the color suggestions and went with a more striking edge highlight than offered in the video.

Now that I had basics and a solid direction down, it was time to get to painting. I alternated between painting both units between waiting for washes to dry at various stages; this helped to make sure I didn’t waste time, and kept me from getting bored painting the same model over and over. This still didn’t stop me from just starting with one Immortal and one Destroyer each, I didn’t want to start the assembly lining until I knew what I was doing and what was going to work. This lead me back to my original challenge of making sure the Dynasties would look distinct, but at the same time seem all part of the same army.

Here was the result…

I was the happiest with how the Immortals came out, I had painted them 5 at time and by the second 5 I fixed some minor quibbles like making the Edge Highlight of Fire Dragon Bright more Edge and less Highlight. I also had to go over with some watered down Nuln Oil to lighten the Orange just a bit to get the effect I wanted.

As for the Destroyers it was more a challenge, because of the state the models were in from previous owners, so it required a lot more drybrushing and cleanup than I expected. As you can see I used White and Red to bring both units together, I left the Fire Dragon Bright edge highlight off the Destroyers, as I felt the Gold was enough bling for the unit. My favorite part of the Destroyers though is the split Red and White heads, which I felt came out really well. 

The next unit I hope to tackle in week 2 are the Wraiths, the metallics I plan to use should go down much easier than the Destroyers and I look forward to seeing the final result!