Necrons Rebooted -- First Necron Warrior Unit -- Finished!

Fellow Overlords!

It just took much longer than expected but here they are finally! The first Necron Warrior Unit finished in shiny metal and fluorescent glow!

Necrons Rebooted -- First Necron Warrior Unit -- Assembly & Painting

Fellow Necron Lords!

After all the experiments with new materials and preparations being completed, it is time to start with the production of the bodies for my eternal servants!

First shall be a unit of humble Warriors.

The longest (and most tedious) part of the assembly was actually the removal of the mold lines of all the parts, followed by the fixing of the part mismatches after gluing things together. Here, one really feels the age of the venerable Necron warrior kit (almost as if it could indeed be 60 million years old! ;-))

Anyway, also the painting should be relatively fast with my new scheme.

To start with there is no annoying priming with a wasteful and inaccurate spray can outside in the cold winter's wind! Instead, I go directly with the gloss black base from AK interactive applied by airbrush:

It is good when it is really glossy and shiny! The more, the better for the mirror effect of the chrome paint! In fact, the Warriors do not appear really black in the above photo because of the gloss...

Now, time for the "super-advanced near-indistructable and self-repairing metal alloy"...

... which consists of first Xtreme Metal Chrome (above) followed by some Blue Metal accents (below).

Now, the Warriors are ready for the detail work to be done by paint brush...

Necrons Rebooted -- The ultimate Scarab factory

To all you experimenters out there,

after my first experiments with the Blue Stuff, leading to the production of many new Scarab bodies, I decided that it would be worth it to have a permanent (and improved) mold for the production of endless Scarab swarms (muhahaha!).

And once more, Green Stuff World provided me the right tools for the job! In this case, I am using the 2-component silicone putty.

First I needed a good encasing for the mold in which I arranged the Scarab prototypes. After searching the house, I found this plastic lid for some cosmetic product:

Again, I used UHU Patafix for fixating the Scarabs, leaving a few mm of space between them but also choosing the most compact arrangement possible to minimize the  amount of silicone required for the mold (this stuff is quite expensive!).

Now, it was time to mix the two components of the silicon putty. To get a better idea how much I would need for the mold, I first cut a part of only one component, spread it out in my hand to a little pancake and then held it inside the lid to see how much it would cover.
Based on that, I decided to use a quarter of the total amount for each component (which later turned out to be a bit too much maybe...)

Now, the cool part with this silicone putty is that it is super easy to work with! Many years ago, I already did some molds with fluid two component silicone, and in my memory this was more intricate to work with.
The silicone putty you just mix in your bare hands like Green Stuff.

But beware! You have only a couple of minutes before it starts hardening. So I tried to mix it as fast as possible 😁😁

And then I pressed it into the lid starting in the middle and working my way outwards (to allow the air to get out on the sides).

This is how it looked after:

The big advantage of using a transparent container for the mold, is that I could check underneath how well the silicone was covering the Scarabs and press with my thumbs from the other side to improve the fit.
Again beware though, you have only very little time for these corrections! In fact, I overdid it a bit with the results that the molds for two or three of the larger Scarabs got deformed.

After 10 minutes, the silicone is already hard to the touch, and you can remove the container and the scarabs:

I waited 24 hours before I first used the mold just to be sure it was fully dried. As casting material, I used the Acrylic Resin as well from GreenStuffWorld:

And after half an hour or so, we have our first new Scarabs ready to be cleaned and used!

(If you look very carefully at the big Scarabs, you see that I slightly messed up 3 or 4 of their molds by pressing the silicone too much too long when making the mold. Next time I will be more careful).

This was my first attempt to use the silicone putty to make molds, and I have to say that it is quite easy to use and gives great results!

Necrons Rebooted -- Making of the skull bases with BlueStuff and Acrylic Resin

Hi again,

here another little article on how I employed some new techniques for the creation of my rebooted Necrons:

Before, the first Necron Warriors can be assembled and send onto their first purge, some scenic bases matching my "Terminator" scheme need to be build. So: skulls! Many skulls! That is of course also very Grim Dark and thus matching for Warhammer 40k!

Fortunately, nowadays it is easy to obtain many skulls! One of the most genial boxes that GW released last year (or so) was the skull box with hundreds of (not only human) skulls! Absolutely love it!!

One side note: While this box is absolutely awesome and even competitively priced compared to resin or metal skulls from other companies, one thing that they do not mention are the 5+ hours of removing mold lines from each skull! This is a work that can drive a hobbyist really crazy!!! Fortunately, for me I had some help with this tedious task....

OK, so the theme for the bases is simple: destroyed imperial city (so much rubble) and skulls (and some other bones for good measure... ;-)).

Now I had 10 fine bases but I need many, many more! Possibly more than thee are skulls in this little awesome GW box?! Also gluing individual skulls is a quite tedious work it turns out!

So, here comes my idea: why not use the amazing Blue Stuff and Acrylic Resin from GreenStuffWorld to duplicate these 10 bases? Or actually even triplicate...

And here we go:

1. To make a mold of only the terrain on-top of the base (and not the plastic base itself -- of which I have plenty and thus save on both Blue Stuff and Acrylic Resin), we need to prepare our bases into a form and cover the plastic with some material (in my case Play Doh). For this purpose I find LEGO very convenient, and it always makes me smile when I take out these stones with which I played already when I was 3 years old...

2.  Next, we heat the Blue Stuff making it really hot because it is a lot of surface to cover and it becomes not workable really quickly.

3. Remove the Blue Stuff  from the bases and the Play Doh. And now the casting can begin! It split the 10 bases in three smaller mixtures of Acrylic Resin because the latter also becomes unworkable very quickly.

4. Remove the cases "bases", rework and glue to the plastic bases:

5. Prime everything and ready (for the minature)!

Necrons Rebooted -- Tests and comparison with Fluorescent Paints

Hey all you special effect lovers out there!

One of the new things that will make the rebooted Necrons superior is the usage of fluorescent paints!

I first learned about the existence of these interesting paints, adding another level to your miniatures over at Massive Voodoo, quite some years ago actually! They called them Dayglow colours, mixed them up themselves, made some experiments and created some fantastic paintjobs with those (I particularly love the demon on the linked page above).

Anyway, in 2011, I was (apparently) not ready for these but now I saw that you can buy fluorescent paints not only over at Vallejo but also at GreenStuffWorld -- these are like normal acrylic paints and can be used in exactly the same way. The difference to normal paints become however obvious when you shine some ultraviolet (UV) light onto them, which makes them glow intensively.

My hope with these colours was that they would appear a bit more intense than normal colours even in normal light, and thus would be perfect for glowing effects like plasma or gauss weapons and so on.

I bought some colours from both companies (Vallejo Model Color Fluorescent Blue not shown):

And if you shine an UV torch onto them...

... they glow really bright! The camera is in fact not able to capture this glow properly.

OK, let's first compare the hues in "normal" white LED light:

In the above photo you can see two relatively thick layers of each colour applied by brush onto white paper. The following becomes obvious:

• None of the colours is really opaque  even after two layers --> need a clean white underground
• In terms of hue, the GreenStuffWorld Lime and Red are in between the Vallejo Green and Yellow and Orange and Magenta, respectively.

In addition, I noticed the following other things:

• The colours have a slightly funny smell (might bother some people).
• The GreenStuffWorld colours are thinner on average than the Vallejo paints but have the same opaqueness. 
• Both the GreenStuffWorld and Vallejo paints had some hard fallout at the bottom of the bottles that I could only get activated by mechanical mixing with a little metal rod 
• The Vallejo paints seem to be a bit more "slimy", i.e., a bit like glue.
• The Vallejo paints are a bit glossy when they are dry.

The above things together make me  prefer the GreenStuffWorld fluorescent paints slightly.

Next, you might wonder about mixing the fluorescent paints:

• Mixing with other fluorescent paints is not problem. The photo below shows for example that if you mix the Vallejo Green and Yellow, you basically get the GreenStuffWorld Lime.
• Mixing with non-fluorescent paints is not a good idea. The photo below shows two examples, where I mixed the Vallejo Green and Blue each with Skull White from GW

So how do the paints appear when one adds some UV light to the white LED light:

It is a bit hard to see in the above photo again but the colours start to glow intensely even with the tinniest amount of UV light.

And here, how it look with UV light only:

Hard to capture the glow properly but maybe you get an idea. Otherwise, you have to take my word for it that:

• Both the Vallejo and GreenStuffWorld paints glow at similar intensity
• Exception is the Vallejo Blue whose glow is very faint
• The mixtures with Skull White glow much less

As a funny side effect, you get really cool looking cleaning papers:

And finally, and example of these paints on a miniature, i.e., the classic Necron Warrior that I showed you a few posts ago. This time in UV light:

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!).