Warhammer 40,000 - Noctilith Crown
Wouldn’t look out of place in the film Event Horizon.
What’s not to love about a big evil star gate? Especially when it boosts the power of nearby psykers. I love that Games Workshop is doing faction specific terrain more and more these days, I feel it makes for a more interesting battlefield than you would get with the generic ruins of days past. In any case, this looked like a simple kit that I could smash out in no time at all. Especially, it seems to be made of just two components: the inner ring and the metal housing. Everything else is just detailing.
Being a rather simple, if massive, model the build with relatively painless the only issue was that the chains and skulls under the platform were a bit fiddly to get attached. With that done, I primed the whole model with Army Painter Matt Black primer. For the metallics I used Vallejo Metal Colour Magnesium through the airbrush. This stuff flows like a dream out of an airbrush, it took me around ten minutes with the airbrush on full blast to basecoat everything metallic in a nice solid silver coat. From there I started to work on some of the details, such as painting the clamps that hold the ring in place with Balthasar Gold to break up the silver, and pick out the skulls with Army Painter Skeleton Bone. For a bit of tonal variety, I painted the chains with Leadbelcher. Technically, Citadel Leadbelcher and Vallejo Metal Colour Magnesium are equivalent colours but as the latter was applied with an airbrush the former simply brushed out, they end with slightly different finishes.
Just in case it wasn’t clear, this thing is massive
With the metallics done, it was time for a wash. As it was big and mechanical, I toyed with the idea of just doing a pin wash around the rivets/bolts and recesses. However, there is actually a fair amount of texture on it, the outer ring might be quite clean and flat but the base and support struts are riddled with notches, scratches and pits.
As usual for terrain pieces I decided to mix my own wash rather than use up a whole pot of Nuln Oil. I have discussed this elsewhere on my blog but I’ll cover it again here. All you need to make your own are the following:
Paint medium. This is just paint without the colour, I use matt medium but gloss or satin would work too if that’s the finish that you wanted.
Surfactant. This lowers the surface tension so your mix is less likely to bead together, you can use washing up liquid or a dedicated flow improver.
Colours! Inks and pigments are the usual go-to’s here as they are basically raw colour. Contrast Paints are also great for this as they’re highly saturated.
And finally some water to dilute it down to the consistency you want.
For my specific mix, I combined Liquitex Black acrylic ink with Wyldwood Contrast paint to make a very dark black/brown colour which I diluted down with matt medium, water and a drop of flow improver until it was the consistency of a wash. To minimize pooling I decided to apply the wash in sections. Either by design or happenstance, if you prop up the inner ring with a Citadel paint pot the Noctilith Crown will lie pretty level on it’s back. I left it in that position while it dried, again keeping an eye out for pooling. Once it was dry, I flipped the model over and repeated the process on that side.
The outer ring as it’s relatively smooth and curved the highly fluid wash that I mixed together would likely leave coffee stains as there is not where for it to go but sit on one the flat surface. So with that in mind, I decided to use oil paints; I mixed equal parts black and burnt umber paints together with a few drops of white spirit so that it ended up about the consistency of acrylic paint. I wanted it nice and thick so the paint would stay where I put it and stain the layer underneath it. I applied the paint to the outer ring and left it for thirty minutes before using a makeup sponge to wipe it away. And with that, the outer ring became a nice dark metal colour without me having to worry about washes pooling. To make sure the oil wait had properly cured, I left it overnight before continuing with any further painting. Once it was dry however, I drybrushed all the metallics with Necron Compound.
In the lore the inner ring is made from Blackstone, a substance that can either suppress or amplify psychic powers depending on what you do with it. For example, I believe the pylons on Cadia were made from Blackstone. In any case, as humans are fairly unimaginative Blackstone would in fact be a stoney black colour. Unfortunately, black can be a rather flat and boring colour to paint. The trick, most of the time, is to paint it very-nearly-but-not-quite-black. That way you can shade actual black in the recesses. Additionally, as my model is mostly silver painting the inner ring black would leave it feeling very monochromatic. As such, I decided to paint the inner ring a very dark green. With that in mind, I base coated it with a couple of layers of Incubi Darkness which is a dark blue-green colour. To bring out all the lovely texture, I then washed it with Nuln Oil. I was worried that a black wash over the very dark Incubi Darkness wouldn’t show up too well, but it turned out alright. To help further bring out the detail, I gave it a drybrush with Caliban Green. Then I gave it a light drybrush with Niblet Green, going a bit heavier on the tips of the spikes. I use a similar recipe for the crystals on my Blackstone Fortress miniatures, which is rather appropriate. At this point the model was mostly green and silver so I wanted to add some contrast into the mix. The perfect colour for which would be purple. I mixed some Army Painter Purple Tone with a few drops of Vallejo Game Ink Violet and ran it over the recessed coils in the outer ring. It wasn’t quite as vibrant as I hoped but the subtle colour worked equally well. For the runes on the ring, I thinned down some Xereus Purple a bit more than usual so that it flowed beautifully into the recesses. For some fun, I decided to have the runes glow under blacklight as I happen to have some of the Greenstuff World fluorescent paints. I’m fairly sure these are gel based so they can go a bit streaky when thinned with water, so I thinned my Greenstuff World Fluor Violet with an equal amount of Lahmian Medium. I was tempted to crack out the enamels for some weathering, but I decided not to go overboard and keep it simple. I heavily diluted down some Skrag Brown until it was practically water, then ran this into select recesses around bolts and rivets.
Overall, this was a fun project, I got to play with a lot of different techniques and paints. I’m glad that I went with green for the inner ring rather than black, gives it a more alien and unknown feel. However, if I were to do it all over again I would have definitely done some sub-assemblies. Like the chains under the platform, they tended to get in the way holding the model and in fact I ended up accidentally snapping one off while painting it. Also, I would leave the support struts off as well as they did make some of the underside a little tricky to get to. Plus it being such a big model made it a little unwieldy to hold and paint, definitely not a painting handle big enough for this!