Painting a Necron Tomb Spyder

The closest I ever want to get to a spider

After a few months break due to an expanding family, it's a New Year, I'm finally getting more than 3 and half hours sleep a night and I'm going to try to get a few more of these posts done a month. For the first one of the year, I'm going to show off some more of my mediocre painting that I finished last year but hadn't posted yet.

As I'm unlikely to get a regular gaming session going and I'm more about the painting and collecting anyway, I'm basically just picking any miniatures that take my fancy and doing them. Therefore, for no particular reason at all, I decided to go for the Necron Tomb Spyder. I think the Necron release from GW a couple of years ago (or whenever it was) breathed some much needed new life into the army allowing characters and providing some very nice models that really had needed updating for some time. I'm not sure I agree with the C'Tan retcon but even here, I can see why they did it. So after randomly deciding to buy a Tomb Spyder when it came out (odd seeing as I'm really not good with spiders) and then having it sit around gathering dust for 12 months, I finally got round to painting it.

As with most things I do, I copied what I did from someone else, in this case White Dwarf. I went for the rather awesome Dark Green/Dark Angel style colour scheme (the Sautekh dynasty as I have just looked up) and the finished result can be seen here:

After an undercoat of Chaos Black spray paint, I did the usual trick of Base-Wash-Layer-Layer (or Base-Layer-Wash-Layer) using the following colours:

• Armour - Caliban Green (base), Warpstone Glow (Layer), Biel-Tan Green (Wash), Moot Green (highlight)
• Metal Areas - Leadbelcher (base), Nuln Oil (wash), Ironbreaker (Highlight 1), Runefang Steel (highlight 2)
• Power Sources - Caliban Green (base), Moot Green (Layer), White Scar (Layer), Waywatcher Green (Wash)

Some things of note while I was painting the spider:

• After the base of Caliban Green, I was really worried the armour looked too green as opposed to the almost-black as it appears in WD. Turns out that after you add the highlights and the wash, it tones this down quite a bit to give a much darker finish.
• The first edge highlight of the main armour was thicker and over all of the edges of the model. The second, brighter one was thinner and only over corners or areas I wanted to emphasise or look 'powered up'. I didn't do a brilliant job at this (damn my poor fine motor control) but it still made things look more interesting than a single one colour edge highlight over the whole model.
• For the power sources, I painted all layers one after the other while they were still wet - making the painted areas smaller each time. This was my somewhat-made-up attempt at wet blending which, to a certain extent worked. I think if I ever try this on larger areas though, I'm going to have to improve it quite a bit.

Hopefully this will help the next time I want to paint some Space Wolves. Next: on to some Necrons!

The full gallery can be found on my 500px page here. Enjoy :)