Warhammer 40,000 - Necron Lord Hasmoteph & Cryptek Kamoteph

I have had these two sitting on my To Do pile for a long long time. I don’t currently collect Necrons but that just means I have soft plans to collect them at some point in the future. And if I was going to collect Necrons at some point then I needed a colour scheme. But I struggled to come up with one for years. Eventually I settled on wanting to make it the inverse of my Tau colour scheme, which is Tau Light Ochre with Vallejo Night Blue accents. Tau are one of the newest races in the galaxy while the Necrons are one of the oldest so I wanted to play on this dichotomy. It then took yet more time for me to work out how exactly I wanted to achieve this. Which neatly brings us to now. 

With that in mind I dusted off the boxes, opened them up and started putting the models together. Neither model was particularly difficult to assemble, they were a little fiddly but that comes from them being effectively robot skeletons, and I soon got them done in no time. I had some resin crystals leftover from the Blackstone Fortress Models so I stuck a few down on the bases and blended them in with some Milliput. Once that was dry both models were then primed with Colour Forge Matt Black as I would invariably be using metallic paints, which always look better over a dark undercoat. 

I was curious if my slapchop adjacent painting style translated to metallic finishes. With that in mind I sprayed each model at a forty-five degree angle like I was giving them a zenithal highlight, only I used Vallejo Metal Colours Magnesium instead of white ink. The finish was rather darker than I was hoping so to brighten things up I gave each model a fairly heavy drybrush with Necron Compound. 

For the actual colour scheme I painted the armour with Army Painter Speedpaint Highlord Blue with Snakebite Leather used as an accent colour on the heads and cloaks. For some variety I painted the handle of the Cryptek’s staff with Army Painter Speedpaint Runic Grey and any scarabs with Black Templar. To finish off the armour I lightly drybrushed the edges with Necron Compound to give it an aged appearance and, more importantly, so that I didn’t have to do a bunch of edge highlighting. That being said I did pick out the runes on the chest with Scale75 Thrash Metal. 

I wanted the various orbs, crystals and weapon blades to really stand out so I first needed to paint them white for any subsequent colour to really pop out. To achieve this I painted any orbs and eyes with Army Painter Matt White while the weapon blades and crystals I sprayed with Liquitex Titanium White acrylic ink through my airbrush. For the latter I intentionally left some variation in the finish so that it wasn’t a solid colour. I had initially wanted to use Pylar Glacier for the orbs and such but it didn’t have enough punch even with the white undercoat so instead I used Talassar Blue which turned out damn near luminous. Using the airbrush to apply it like I did with the white ink resulted in a quick and easy OSL (object source lighting) effect. And with that the models were done! It turns out that without being festooned with pouches, straps and other paraphernalia that models are pretty quick to paint.

I decided that I wanted to base these Necrons in the same way that I do my Tau. Partly as the desert theme contrasted nicely with the dark blue and partly because I wanted to reinforce the link between the two races. To do this I first covered the bases with Armageddon Dust texture paint. Once that was dry I gave it a wash of Seraphim Sepia followed by a drybrush of Tyrant Skull. I then painted the rims black and stuck down a few Army Painter Burnt tufts. To finish things off I heavily thinned some Vallejo Khaki and ran it into some recesses on the feet and legs to give the impression of dust build up. This didn’t quite look right, Khaki is a rather strong colour and has more red tones that one might expect. If I was to do it again I would definitely use a different colour.