[Hobby] For Meat and Metal, All Must Die | Starting the Necron Army

 Last year, in a fit of fiscal imprudence occasioned by a 20% off sale in a now-closed model shop just across the Border, I bought myself a Necron army for my birthday.

At the time, I wasn't a hundred per cent sure if I'd be able to paint "properly" again - my fine motor control's been going and my wrists were in ever increasing agony that summer, chronic pain exacerbated by working conditions. As such, I wanted my next project to be something that didn't need much detail work - something I could do with broad layers and mostly Number 2 brushes, and finish off with a couple of key elements.

 

I also wanted to use up the bottles of Liquitex ink I'd had kicking around for years. Buying an entirely new army on the pretext that it'll use up some paint is not conventional wisdom, but there's a lot about this project that wasn't conventionally wise.

For instance: starting the collection with a Lord of War.

In my defence, my partner enabled me something awful with this. "You'll enjoy building it, I'll enjoy seeing it built, and maybe you'll stop coveting my art deco lamp for Necron terrain."

I will never stop coveting this lamp for Necron terrain.
Seriously, spray that black and stick a green bulb in it...

After a weekend of contemplation, things escalated somewhat.

The Primaris, in case you wondered, ended up as the start of Garbutt's new Space Marine army, the Sworn. He and I go back a few years, to say the least, and about a decade ago at the dawn of sixth edition his Hawk Lords Space Marines and my original, second hand, chrome-and-blue Necrons were shooting the tar out of each other. We renewed the rivalry over Dawn of War some time ago, and now we're taking it back to the battlefields of the forty-second millennium, with the "lore clock" having advanced around a century when Dark Imperium dropped. (I gather that's all become a bit more wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey now, but whatever, I like "forty thousand years in the future" and the step into a new millennium in-universe as well as outside.)

These, however, are not the chrome and blue Necrons. As much as I enjoyed playing that army, the older half was painted by another's hand, the newer half by mine, and it was very clear that I hadn't used the same colours or style. It was never really a collection over which I had agency, you know?

This is the only photo I still have of that army.
The Dark Eldar involved are Garbutt's.

These are the bronze and purple Necrons. Why? Because those were the inks I had. Specifically, I had bottles of Iridescent Bronze and Silver, Carbon Black, Dioxazine Purple, Deep Violet and Translucent Raw Umber. For finishing, a Citadel technical or two - I had bottles of Hexwraith Flame and Nighthaunt Gloom knocking around, so I didn't rush out and go for the traditional bright green glow, and so much Zandri Dust and Agrellan Earth and Armageddon Dust from a failed Tomb Kings project...

On the whole, it's a warmer palette than I'm used to. My other "modern" armies are both cold blues and greys and bronze on snowy bases, and I've historically been very comfortable with "metals, blues, splash red/brown" as a palette. (I'm recalling now that my Trollbloods for Hordes were probably the nicest looking models I ever did.)

So, I bought a couple of cans of the new Grey Seer primer, figuring these inks would behave approximately like Contrast paints, and went to work. Here are the results so far.

The Flayed Ones are where it started to really come together, and that's probably because they don't have guns. Early on I made the decision to use the Carbon Black on the guns and... if I had my time over again, I wouldn't do that. The thing is, it's weirdly sticky, but still thin enough that it gets onto and stains areas it's not supposed to reach, and it's dark enough that it's a bugger to paint over and clean up. As such, the gun barrels on many of the models are... well, stained. Worn. Damaged. I've decided I'm okay with it. It's that or die mad.

My gap filling technique leaves a little to be desired,
but at least it gruffs up the smooth surfaces somewhat...

The weird "bike helmet" headdress on the Overlord always throws me.
Looks like a single mad eye, and detracts from his actual face.
Maybe I should have done that in bronze and the headdress in purple.

Over Easter, I had the luxury of painting on the deck. Idyllic.

The Skorpekh, I think, show off what I've started to learn with regards to these inks. By layering either purple or violet over silver or bronze, I actually have about four different purples I can muster up. These inks tend to "reactivate" whatever's beneath them and blend up really nicely. It almost makes up for the hours of drying time involved in the Raw Umber settling itself down.

I had the bright idea of building a little diorama on my Night Scythe's base: a bunch of Chaos Androids, the distant Epic scale ancestors of the Necron, squaring off with some Epic Space Marines who can pass for Intercessors. I painted them red to vaguely indicate either Garbutt's Sworn or my local opponent's Blood Angels, stuck an old Exalted Champion base with a now "big" Necron skull to give them a hill to die on, and hoped the flying base didn't mess things up too much. And now we're in tenth edition and the flyer rules don't really cover being a kajillion metres above the battlefield any more. Ah well.

The plane itself has layer upon layer involved, as the Raw Umber kept on streaking and everything bled onto the part of the carapace I'd decided to paint purple and the Carbon Black just would not cover over larger areas. I'm not entirely happy with it, but perfect is kind of the enemy of done, and I don't intend to use this plane often enough to make the absolute best of it that I can.

The Triarch Stalker came courtesy of Imperium magazine, the deep discount of choice for the discerning veteran hobbyist passing themself off as a total n00bling in search of a bargain. I stuck mine on a base because I have owned one without a base in the past and it was a hateful thing that fell apart constantly. Also, I find walkers without bases look really short compared to the infantry; ground level should be the same for everything that walks on the ground. Again, it's not perfect; the attempt to blend the two different textures and colours on the base hasn't come out that well.

Vehicle kits are still relatively new territory for me - I've only painted a dozen or so models bigger than a Dreadnought despite being in the hobby for nearly thirty years, and Dreadnoughts are easy because they just read as a big guy to me, an oversized infantry model. These, with their colours needing to go in different places, threw me somewhat... but I wanted to practice on them, because I still have the centrepiece of the collection to work on.

The Monolith is built. It's in several sub-assemblies, because I know I'll never reach the core through the outer shell if I stick it together, and also because I need to decide what colour each bit of it's going to be. I'm thinking black on silver for the core gubbins, bronze for the inner shell, and purple for the outer layer, broken up with the guns. I'll get to it around the same time as I get the Tomb Blades done - good lord, I hate those models so much, they're so flimsy and they'll be a devil to hang on to. But once they're done, they'll be some more fast objective touchers for what's emerged as a thousand point army, plus a blundering great Lord of War that it would be rather bad form to bring to Incursion.

Hopefully I'll get them done before my next birthday in December, around which time we're expecting the tenth edition codex, and I can take them out for a spin.

Necrons in tenth edition seem a lot more fun than Necrons in ninth, an army that expected so much system mastery considering they were in the starter set. The ability to predict which two of twelve possible abilities you could afford to do without, and then which order you wanted to use the other pairs in, and then which half of the pair you wanted, except for the one pair that you could use both of, and synergised with your subfaction's abilities, hopefully abilities you liked? That's too much faff. The new Command Protocols are just... stratagems. Spend a Command Point and a thing happens. I can work with that. Really looking forward to it.