On The Desk - Necron Overlord Part 1

Taking a little break from Rackham I had a browse through my 'Box of Shame' as I like to call it. This is the box of various miniatures I've purchased over the years but haven't got round to painting for whatever reason. We all have one. Mine is...overflowing slightly.

So I was looking around trying to find inspiration for a new project and came across the old Necron Overlord model by Games Workshop. A great sculpt in my opinion despite it sadly being the now retired 'finecast' As with every 'finecast' miniature it felt like the preparation stage took a few hours more than it should have as I sculpted and filled all the mistakes that 'finecast' provides (can you guess I wasn't a fan of 'finecast'?) Please feel free to share how much you loved 'finecast' in the comments ;)

Once that was done I paused to consider what colour scheme I wanted to go with. Sometimes when starting a project I like to take a black and white photo into photoshop and have a play round with colour. You can either use an unpainted image or simply convert a painted image to black and white (If you don't know how to do this have a google, there are plenty of guides out there) Once you have your image in photoshop, create a second layer and set it to 'overlay'. Then grab the paint tool and put some colour on!

I wanted to step away from the standard schemes you see with Necrons, 90% of them are basic silver metal bodies with either green or blue contrast for the orbs and gauss areas. I wanted to try some other metals, especially having painted a lot of Non Metallic Metal lately it would be a nice break. I wasn't overly concerned by being accurate to the 'fluff'. Being a painter rather than a gamer I don't always follow the codex schemes, although I did browse through the Necron codex to get inspiration.

Here are a few sketches of ideas I had for this model, these really are sketches, they're rough and I don't usually paint the whole model (in this case I didn't even touch the staff) It's just for me to get an idea about what might work.

Scheme 1:

Mostly black metallic armour, contrasted with some rich gold areas. I'm slightly ashamed to say I abandoned this idea pretty quickly. I hate painting black. I say I'm ashamed because I like to try and push my boundaries. A colour you 'hate' painting is just one you haven't had enough practice at yet.

Scheme 2:

With this one I looked at having pale cream almost ceramic armour plates as supposed to metal. Contrasted with a carmine red. I love this shade of red, I've been using it quite a bit lately.

Scheme 3:

This one doesn't come across so well in photoshop, I considered an oxidised metal for the armour with perhaps copper. I think this scheme has potential but in the end the second scheme had already won me over!

Now unfortunately I actually did all this before I knew I'd be writing this blog so I don't have as many photos as I'd like of the painting process, in the future there will be more! First step is as always priming. I don't really have a hard and fast rule for priming, sometimes I just prime black but in this case I decided to go with Zenithal priming. I primed all black then went back with white and did a light spray from above the model. The benefits this brings is it makes it much easier to see the details of the model as well as giving a natural guide to lighting. Following this I always take a few photos of the model in this state to go back and reference as I paint.

So I start to put some colours on the model, for the red I used mostly 09134 Clotted Red from Reaper Master Series with some blacks and purples used in the shadows. The cream was a mix of GW Karak stone, Vallejo Model Colour Ivory (70918) and a little VMC Leather Brown (70871) for the darker areas. At this stage I also painted the armour joints with a 50:50 mix of Necro Gold and Thrash Metal, both from Scale Colour. The spine on his back was painted with Necro Gold alone.I left the helm for the moment because I hadn't fully decided what I wanted to do with it.

I think that is enough for this week! Not much actual painting but I feel it is very important to have a good process with a project before you even pick up a brush. How do you like to start a model? Do you do sketches, collect reference photos or anything like that? Please share in the comments and ask any questions!