Necron Speedpainting- A Battleforce in a Weekend

For the 40K 25th anniversary celebration, our local shop had an Iron Builder going- buy a Battleforce box on Saturday, and have it fully assembled by closing time on Sunday.  I enjoy these kinds of challenges, they get people focusing on getting things done, and being more than a bit mad, I decided to take things just a bit further- build AND paint the thing before 5PM Sunday.  Now, it's important to note that I didn't actually have all that much time that weekend, between helping a friend move, and a Pathfinder session that I had to leave for at about 3:30.  So I picked up the box on Saturday afternoon between other obligations, and didn't get to start until about 11:30PM on Saturday night.

Building the models was pretty straightforward.  Necrons have the distinct advantage of not having a whole lot in the way of options- for the contents of the box, all I had to choose was which vehicle to build, and which weapon option to give to the Immortals.  Being as this was the start of a new force, I decided to keep things simple, building the Ghost Ark as a transport for half of the Warriors, and assembling the Immortals with Gauss Blasters.  Of course, the mathhammering and reading up on the guns on Warseer ate some time, but all in all, I had all of the infantry built by mid-day on Sunday (and no, I didn't pull an all nighter- I worked from 11:30PM-1:30AM, and then started up again around 10AM).  I have some rather copious notes on the order I went in, not really sure why I thought that was necessary, but if you're interested in the exact order, let me know in the comments!  The key to all of this is to be working CONSTANTLY.  There's a number of parts that need to be dry before you can move on (namely torso halves and waist joints), so the smarter you are about bouncing between units, the more efficient you can be.   I started out with gluing the legs to the bases and gluing sand on as a second step, before even clipping out most of the parts, to ensure that the PVA would be good and dry by the time I got around to priming everything.  I also made the decision to mount the Scarabs three to a base instead of four- building them that way gives you a whole extra swarm, and allows them to be a quick reference to how many wounds are remaining (Mine aren't glued to the pegs, so I can pull them off when the swarm is damaged).

I will go into some detail on the assembly of the Ghost Ark, as it was kind of a pain.  I assembled the casualties while working on the Warriors and Immortals, but missed the little spines that help join them to the Ark.  That was a problem later.  I also found that the ribs are not quite symmetrical- they have a slight V shape to the joining surfaces that if you don't notice, can make them a hell of a lot harder to get to fit together.  I built it in assemblies, mostly per the directions, leaving out the pilot and the casualties, and ended up sticking the whole thing together while waiting for the first layer of paint on the infantry to dry.  I figured I could get the casualties in afterwards, which is technically possible, but I don't really recommend it.

Painting the force was easy, and a prime example of what I refer to as "materials-based painting".  The way I like to look at it, you have two choices when painting miniatures- you either look at them as a composition, which is where you will see painters that work hard at using the color wheel and manipulating the attention of the viewer, or you can paint them as though they are a real entity, looking more at what each individual part of the figure is, and painting them accordingly.  There are certainly merits to both schools, but I find it to be easier and faster to do the latter, as you can more easily apply the same scheme to every figure in an army.  Necrons in particular are easy, as you basically have three materials to deal with- the metal of the body, the weapons, and the internal workings of weapons and vehicles.  It is also easily applied to other armies as well- for example, the average Space Marine force has ceramite armor, flesh, exposed metal, and stowage, all of which are easy to standardize.  For the Necrons, I was going for quick and dirty, so I did the majority of the painting with a spraygun.

I based the Warriors, Immortals, and Scarabs with Boltgun Metal, followed by a spray coat of Badab Black wash.  Nice and neat, with the classic Necron look.  The Ghost Ark and the weapons were painted Tin Bitz with a heavy coat of Thraka Green wash, which gives a nice aged patina while contrasting with the silver and giving a bit of complement to the bright green accent colors.  The basing is Tausept Ochre, drybrushed Bleached Bone, with Calthan Brown around the base edges, a nice simple desert scheme that I've used before.  I will likely be going back and adding patches of yellowed grass for some extra detail.  I have seen other painters leave the sand bare for desert basing, and actually did it myself for my Warmachine army for a while, but it just doesn't work right- when the rest of the textures on a figure are being simulated with paint, the sight of a real surface just looks wrong, distracting the viewer and taking away from the scale look of the figure.  The hoses and vents on the weapons and the eyes were painted Scorpion Green, along with the barrels on the Gauss Blasters, which then got a coat of Chainmail on the vented shrouds.  I am a little sad that they did away with the green rods on the Immortals- obviously they wanted to leave things more open for other color schemes, but I just love the look of the rods, it's different from every other faction in the game, and ties the army together really nicely.

Obviously this force isn't going to win me any Golden Daemons, but that's not really the point of the exercise.  I've got entire armies, sitting in boxes, waiting for me to get "in the mood" to paint them (my Vostroyans and Space Wolves are particularly guilty of this).  While that's all well and good for someone like me that has other painted armies to use in the meantime, I have played against a lot of grey plastic, which is sad.  For players that are looking for a strategy game, but not a painting hobby, I am puzzled as to why they're playing 40k- there are much, much better wargames out there that use paper counters instead of staggeringly expensive models.  For those that think painting is "too hard", I would put this out there as the counter-argument- there is absolutely nothing going on with this army that I couldn't teach to a 12 year old in a couple of hours- there's not even that much brush control necessary.  At that point, the only thing left is laziness, and disrespect for your opponents- it is one thing to be working on getting a force completed and playing with it while you're doing so, quite another to build an army with no intention of ever actually getting it done.  In my experience, those sorts of players also tend to be rather unpleasant to play against, and rather quickly find themselves "voted out" of a local player group.

Necrons are the obvious choice for this kind of speedpainting exercise, but they're far from the only ones that it will work for.  Drop me a line in the comments, let me know what you think I should try next, or if you want advice on how to structure your painting in order to speed things up- I'm also considering running a workshop on it, so let me know if it's something you'd be interested in.

Painting Step-By-Step: WHFB Nurgle Champion

So, in an effort to stave off building a new Ogre Kingdoms army (good lord their new monsters look cool!), I've been trying to knock out some older WHFB projects- namely my Chaos army. I originally built the force when I worked at GW, quite literally because I was left alone in the store too long. When you get that good of a discount, it becomes remarkably easy to talk yourself into things, and the next thing I knew, I was playing a 2000 point game the next night. Flash forward a couple of years, and I have a strangely configured force that's only half painted. I've been playing some games, and getting some painting done of late, and along comes the new plastic Nurgle hero. I've been a huge fan of the new single-sprue plastic figs that GW has been putting out of late, they use the material very nicely, and are really nicely thought out- if this is what is eventually going to replace Finecast as the replacement for metal figs, sign me up. It also just so happens that our local GW shop is starting up a cyclical paint competition- everyone paints the same model, winner is decided by votes by store visitors, and the winner chooses the next figure. A paint competition? With a figure I wanted anyway? Sounds good to me. I haven't really done this kind of step-by-step since I was logging my painting on Warseer, so I figured it'd be fun to do again.

STEP 1: Basecoats - 90 min.

On a figure like this, I find it helps to get solid colors in first- while it's not anywhere near as absurd as some of the Privateer figs where you really can't tell what some of the greeblies are, there's a couple of things that are easy to miss, like the strap on the back of his helmet. If I'd started working the flesh without noticing it, I'm not sure I would have even bothered fixing it. This part is easy- Tallarn Flesh for skin, Gretchin Green for cloth, Boltgun Metal for all the armor and the axe blade, Khemri Brown for the horns and the axe haft, Calthan Brown for the straps, and a little bit of Tin Bitz for the three little circles on his chainmail tabard. Neatness is key here, as anything that needs to be corrected after the next step will be kind of a pain.

STEP 2: The Easy Bit (Allegedly) - 35 min.

My Chaos army is unified more in technique than actual color. All of the Warriors start out with silver armor, which then gets sprayed with a wash of their god's chosen color, along with matching capes. The nice part about spraying the washes is that if everything goes according to plan, it behaves more like a glaze than a proper wash- you get a nice smooth coat over the metallic paint beneath. This time, it was slightly less according to plan. Turns out I forgot to clean out my spraygun from the last regiment (Baal Red wash for Khorne warriors). (PROTIP: Don't do that.) Once I got it cleaned up, I got to rejigger my jerry-rigged hose connector, as the GW spraygun hose doesn't seem to match anything else I have, and then get the thing spraying properly. After a half hour of cleaning and fiddling, this step took about a minute and a half, plus a couple of minutes later wicking away some excess wash with a brush to help ensure a smooth finish. The all-over coat also serves the same role as a blackline, helping define transitions between materials without being too stark, and also tones the figure into the green spectrum a bit on all the colors.

STEP 3: Axe I, Horns I, Flesh I - 30 min.

The axe is corroded, but unlike the armor, I want it to be mostly silver, so I re-coated it in Boltgun Metal, leaving the green wash in the pitting. The horns get a coat of Khemri Brown, leaving a bit of the washed brown visible at the base, and between the ridges on the shoulder spikes. The haft of his axe also got some Khemri Brown, mostly a very light edge highlight, as I want to keep that a bit darker. His chainmail also got a quick overbrush of Boltgun, to make it contrast with his green platemail. The flesh gets a coat of Tallarn Flesh, leaving the greenish color visible at the edges and in the rolls of fat. Looking at him again, I actually kind of wish that I'd used Dwarf Flesh here- it's a little ruddier and more translucent, but Tallarn covers ever so much better that Dwarf Flesh has largely fallen out of my arsenal.

Step 4: Gore I, Flesh II - 40 min.

Green wash looks pretty excellent as a shading tone for red- color theory wins again. With that in mind, I want to keep the highlights on the exposed gore crisp and smooth, so that the green shade shows through, and so that they will look good covered in gloss at the end of the process. They got a second coat of Mechrite Red, making sure to look carefully at the holes in the skin to see the texture beneath- not all of them are flat, a couple have secondary indentations, which were left the darker tone. The skin got a layer of Elf Flesh. OMFG do I hate Elf Flesh. It's lightly pigmented, but for some reason seems to be prone to thickening weirdly- if you're getting Cakey-Face when you're painting skin, you're probably using this color. Unfortunately, it's one of the better light skintones out there, even with the weird 90's GW orangey tone. (I will admit here that I forgot about the P3 skintones- I don't think I've used their lighter one. Rackham's old elf skintone is almost white, much too light for this step.) This step covered even less than the second coat of Tallarn Flesh, for a basic layering technique. I attempted to make the transparency of the color work for me, but it's not very consistent. Here I blame one of my many bad painting habits- do as I say, not as I do, and use a palette. Getting used to pot-painting just screws you up later.

STEP 5: Horns III, Flesh touch-up - 30 min.

Most of this step was fixing my lousy painting in the last step. Working slower, with thinner paint, I went over most of the Elf Flesh again, trying to even out the tone. Painting at 12:30PM instead of 2AM helps with this. The horns got a coat of Dheneb Stone, again leaving the darker tones between the ribbing at the base.

STEP 6: Armor I, Gore II- 20 min.

The armor gets a very soft drybrush of Chainmail, to bring out the edges. This is actually my one complaint about the figure- the edges on the leg armor, particularly the knees, is a little soft, with the delineation almost completely disappearing on the outside of the knees. The exposed guts got a highlight of Red Gore, again trying to increase the dimensional effect of the holes.

STEP 7: Armor II, Flesh decomposition, Cloth- 30 min.

The armor gets another soft drybrush of Mithril Silver, concentrated on the hard edges and places that are visually important- the fly on his bracer, and the "face" of the helm. The wounds are outlined with Rotting Flesh, increasing the contrast between the skin and the wounds, and also making the flesh look unhealthy. All of the various sores and pustules are also dotted with Rotting Flesh. Another highlight on the wounds and intestines, mostly focused on the intestines, with Blood Red. The cloth on the tabard is highlighted with Gretchin Green, using the darker green-washed portions as a nice sharp shadow between the folds.

STEP 8: Axe II -5 min.

To further sharpen the contrast with the corroded portions, the blade gets a coating of Chainmail, and then a sponging of Mithril Silver along the sharp edge to make it look sharp, but not perfectly maintained.

STEP 9: Axe III, Armor III -5 min.

On the back half of the blade, it gets a sponging of Tin Bitz, followed by another of Blazing Orange, to get some more traditional weathering. This also gives a second bright point at waist height- the hands on the figure aren't really the visual focus like they'd normally be, in this case, the eye is drawn more to the bright red of the exposed gut, with the bright orange rust drawing the eye across the figure. This is probably also why the Studio version of the fig has a silver helm instead of a green one- it provides another point to draw the eye, since the figure has no face or real eyes for the viewer to be drawn to, and the head is so tiny compared to the rest of him.

With the drybrushing on the armor, it has depth, but it is not green enough anymore. A light glaze of Thraka Green tones it back to green without taking away that highlight. I specifically went light over the eyeholes on the helm, in an attempt to brighten the "face" of the figure to help keep it visually interesting. The skulls also got a quick coat of Bleached Bone to brighten them back up.

STEP 10: Details

Frankly, if this fig was just going into my army, I would probably have stopped after the last step. The painting is solid, the colors look good, and it fits the aesthetic of the rest of the force. For a competition, however, especially one judged by passersby, there needs to be a little more flash in the scheme. I picked out the fly on the bracer in a corroded brass, and stippled some Tin Bitz and Chainmail onto the axe blade to tone down the orange a little bit. I also added some bright green glow in the helmet with Scorpion Green, while re-highlighting around the holes with Mithril Silver. A little bit of paint on the base and gloss on the goopy bits, and I'm done.

So, including meals, writing the blogpost, and a few periods of doing more TV watching than painting, I figure I spent about 8-10 hours staring at this little fat dude. Frankly, I'm still not sure I'm happy with it, but I've pretty clearly moved into the stage where additional tinkering might do more harm than good, so I'm going to wrap it up, and look at it again in a day or so- I have until Saturday before it has to be done for sure. If I were going to do another one of these, I might rethink the skintone- while the ruddier healthy skin tone is easier to paint, and provides a nice contrast, it might be more fun to play around with a more necrotic tone, or a bruised, purplish tone like the studio model. It's been a while since I did a marathon session like this, much less for a single model, it's a nice change of pace from painting full units.

Arcane Ruins painting

If you've spent any amount of time painting in hot, humid weather without air conditioning, you may have noticed an interesting phenomenon- the paint starts acting a lot less like paint, and a lot more like glue until you thin the heck out of it, and then it dries super quickly on the palette. Frustrating, no? I was in the mood to paint yesterday, but rather than ruining a perfectly good model, I took the opportunity to work on a piece of terrain that had been kicking around in the bins for a bit.
The Citadel Arcane Ruins are a great utility piece. Super simple to build and paint, and they stack so well, you don't really have to glue anything unless you have something very specific in mind. My set is currently all loose pillars, as I like the flexibility of just setting them up to suit the game, especially with the True Line of Sight rules in 40K.
The first step was a quick blast with the spraygun, coating them with Charadon Granite. I really, really, really like this color for terrain. It's got a ton of subtle tones in it that you can bring out with different color highlights, and it warms things up nicely from black primer so a drybrush doesn't look too stark.

After the spray coat dried, they got a heavy overbrush of Adeptus Battlegrey. Another good utility color, it does suffer from a similar problem to Codex Grey- if you give a model a solid coat of it, it looks kinda like you didn't paint it at all. Problematic.

The solution to the grey problem also helps tie the piece into my desert themed board a little bit. Bleached Bone, while almost completely replaced in my painting by Dheneb Stone, is really good for a toning drybrush, as it's very translucent. Just a light drybrush, occasionally running a thumb or my palm over flat surfaces to wipe up any excess to avoid brushstrokes, and it's all done.

And the whole thing, with Valten for scale:

Also, be careful about the seams on the sides of the pillars, or you'll be like me, and notice just how bad they show up under bright light just as you post pictures on the Internet for everyone to mock you for...

Stunty Mayhem!

So, I suddenly found myself with a free Sunday on the WHFB week in the local GW tourney rotation. Now, I am NOT a good WHFB player. In fact, I'm pretty abysmal. However, with a free day, I'm not really one to turn down a game. Or three, in this case. The question, then, was what army to play. I tend to flit from army to army in WHFB, whether that's because of my lack of success, or the cause of it, is up for debate. For this one, I decided to go back to my Dwarfs for a couple of reasons. They're a compact army, so I wouldn't have TOO much painting to do, they're pretty rock-solid in smaller games (the shop WHFB tourneys are 1000 points), and I kinda miss playing the little guys. I've been trying really hard to make sure that I only play fully painted armies in store events, trying to be a paragon of the hobby and all that. If I were smart, I would have played my Skaven, since they're pretty much finished, and I definitely have enough done for a 1K game, but what can I say, I'm a glutton for punishment.

The list I planned for the tourney is one of those "so you want to start a army" sort of lists. Warriors, Thunderers, Slayers, a couple of heroes, and the ubiquitous cannon. I'm using mostly Battle for Skull Pass models for a couple of reasons. The most important is that because they're so similar, they're really, really easy to assembly-line paint, even with my color scheme. I also really like building that sort of army out of obvious sets of models- setting the example for someone who's just starting. "Hey kid, look, if you trade for a second Skull Pass set, pick up a Runesmith, and a couple boxes of Slayers, you too can be awesome like me."

Army philosophy aside, here's what I started out with:

All the models have some paint on them, it's just a matter of whether or not it's GOOD paint. The Slayers are priority one, as they're both my favorite models, and the ones that I think most benefit from a decent coat of paint. Plus the Foundation Paints, washes, and the spraygun make them really, really easy to get done to a decent standard.
A quick spray of Tallarn Flesh, followed by Ogryn Flesh wash got their skin sorted, then it was on to the beards. Slayers are notable for their orange hair, so the Mechrite Red I had originally painted them was Not Okay. I went back and laid down Macharius Solar Orange:

followed by a wash of Gryphonne Sepia, and a quick coat of Boltgun Metal on their axes:

I've got fewer pics at this point, but I think you all can figure it out from here. Dwarf Bronze on the remaining metal bits, Khemri Brown on the trousers, and Calthan Brown on leather pouches and shoes, followed by a Devlan Mud wash for those same parts. The Dragon Slayer also got a bit of Mordian Blue on him for woad.
One of my favorite bits of finishing any unit is basing- there's few things that make a unit go from good to great as quickly. Here's the unit after sand, but before paint:

And after:

They got a coat of clearcoat, and then a little bit of static grass.

The next thing on the list was the cannon. I like basing my war machines on the textured movement trays from GW, but the Skull Pass cannon is a little bit smaller than the regular one, so it looks a little lost on that size of base. To eat up some space (and use one of the many Grudge Pony carts I have lying around), I decided to add the cart to the base. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't done that, since it was a pain in my butt to paint. There are a number of small details on the top of the cart that are hard to tell what they are. Here's how they all started out:

And here's the finished product:

This is actually the finished shot of the whole force, as unfortunately I ran out of time because of life getting in a way. Not quite as much as I'd hoped to get done, but at least there's no bare plastic or just-primed figures in the army. Tourney report to follow!