Monday - January 07, 2008
For those about to rock, Part 2
So, in an odd twist of fate, I actually finished a painting project!
It's a strange thing, really. I found that I actually have the power to create things that scare me. I spend all this time and energy putting together the model for my new Necron Lord - featured a few blog posts ago here - and then he sits on my shelf, unpainted, because I don't want to screw him up. He looks so beautiful and majestic and... unblemished... as an unpainted model. You can see all the custom work I did on him. And best of all, he doesn't have a ri-god-damned-diculous paint job that makes you cringe to look at.
And that's the way things go. I make the model, and then I stare at it for months, trying to concoct the perfect color scheme for it. And then I second guess the conclusions I've made, because some colors clash with other colors, it doesn't have enough detail, it has too much detail and would look gaudy, I'd never be able to pull off the blending / pattern I wanted to paint... any number of reasons. So I make adjustments in my head, and a week later I'm second-guessing those conclusions too. The cycle continues until I actually step up to the plate and paint the damned thing.
So that's what I did yesterday. I sat down with Ed and we painted, and this was my target of choice. Honestly, I didn't have most of the colors planned out until I actually started painting. I knew that I wanted to emphasize the glowing green / yellow blend that's trademark to the Necrons, but past there, nothing. So, I worked on the base while I thought about the paint scheme of the actual character.
The pillar was done in a stipple of dark grey, medium grey, and white, and then had a mix of light pink / white painted in for the veins of the marble. The scarabs were painted according to my pre-existing color scheme, and the dirt / rocks were simply done in basecoats of darker colors and drybrushed up to highlights of brown and grey, respectively. Nothing too shocking. The marble pillar was the only challenging thing there, and I'm proud of how it turned out. I wanted to do something other than the "drybrushed grey" stone pillar, and I think I accomplished it without looking like a fool, at very least.
The Necron Lord himself was given golden joints, and a white face with a red stripe over the right eye, as is standard for all of my Necron Lords. I decided to go with the Stealth color that my brother gave me the idea for - he's a big Pontiac Solstice fan, and this mix of shadowy blue-grey and silver is one of the colors it's offered in. This was the same color I used on my previous Necron Lord, but I used far less silver this time and let the blue shine through.
Everything else was pretty standard, except the green glowy bits. That's a mix of Valejo "Lime Green" and Citadel "Dark Angels Green," blended steadily from one to the other. I was really happy with the way the Lime livened up the D.A. Green and kept the level of saturation. It blended nicely and evenly, up to that sick yellow-green that's the Necron trademark. I decided I wanted the wings to look like a collection of energy rods rather than metal wings, so they got the blending treatment too. The color was blended in 4 steps, the first being a roughly 3:1 mix of D.A. Green and Lime Green, up to pure lime green.
I hope to use this model to terrorize my opponents very soon!