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 :)

Painting Space Wolf Grey Hunters

About the only painting I'll ever be able to do

This post is a bit of a change for the previous ones as it actually has nothing to do with computers which is actually quite an achievement for me. I've been buying Games Workshop crap products for what must be at least 20 years now, starting with the original Space Hulk and 40K Rogue Trader, up to 3rd Edition 40K (bit of a break for uni and not having money or space) and on to 5th Edition and beyond. I have a large portion of both mine and my parent's attics filled with the stuff and I still love it. The 40K lore, the miniatures, the hobby, the game - it's awesome. I am, to all intents and purposes, Games Workshop's bitch.

Though I've always liked painting I've never managed to really get the hang of it. But last year GW released a new set of paints and had proper 'For Dummies' style guides that even I could follow and so after buying more plastic crack that I didn't need, I set about trying to actually complete some models to a high standard. Here are the first off to be completed. What we have here is a squad of Grey Hunter Space Wolves:

Essentially, all I did for each was start with spraying everything with The Fang on top of a Chaos Black (or whatever they call it now) undercoat. Then I applied the base colours, followed by a wash, a layer colour or two and a final highlight to the edges of armour or pads. The specific colours used were:

• Power Armour - Russ Grey (base), Agrax Earthshade (wash), Russ Grey (Layer), Fenrisian Grey (highlight 1), Rhinox Hide (highlight 2 - armour chips)
• Furs - Steel Legion Drab (base), Seraphim Sepia (wash), Agrax Earthshade (wash), Mournfang Brown (Layer), Tallarn Sand (layer), Ushabti Bone (highlight)
• Shoulder Pads - Mephiston Red (base), Agrax Earthshade (wash), Mephiston Red (Layer), Wild Rider Red (highlight)
• Gold Areas - Balthasar Gold (base), Gehenna's Gold (layer), Agrax Earthshade (wash), Gehenna's Gold (highlight)
• Metal - Leadbelcher (base), Nuln Oil (wash), Ironbreaker (highlight)
• Bone - Zandri Dust (base), Agrax Earthshade (wash), Ushabti Bone (layer), Screaming Skull (highlight)
• Black Areas - Abaddon Black (base), Skavenblight Dinge (highlight 1), Dawnstone (highlight 2), Administratum Grey (highlight 3)
• Power Sword - Stegadon Scale Green (base), Sotek Green (highlight 1), Temple Guard Blue (highlight 2), Guilliman Blue (wash), Fenrisian Grey (highlight 3)
• Base - Armageddon Dust (base), Agrax Earthshade (wash), Tyrant Skull (highlight)

This is basically taken wholesale from White Dwarf 388 (because I have no imagination). Some of the things I learnt while painting these marines include:

• Power armour is quite easy to paint - base coat, wash and then highlight at the edges. Job done.
• Fur is significantly more tricky. When I next have to do this, I'll avoid Mournfang Brown and just highlight up after washing the base coat of Steel Legion Drab. More practise needed here.
• Little chips in the armour make a big difference and are easy to do.
• The new texture paints, though awesome, can get *everywhere* if you're not careful with the brush. And they are a pain to remove if you get them where they shouldn't be.
• A sodding HATE doing transfers on power armour. I'm guessing I'm missing something, but as far as I can tell, you can't easily put a flat transfer on a convex surface as, thanks to geometry and what not, it can't go flat - much like lining paper in a cake tin. I consequently had to put cuts in the transfers which (because they were really quite flimsy) made it a bugger not to rip in half. Add to that me forgetting about them, handling the miniature and consequently getting the meticulously aligned transfer stuck to my hand made this really rather an annoying procedure. I'll need to look up how best to do this in the future....

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 :)