Space Crusade reboot, part 4: The droids (aka Necron Immortals)

This post is part of a series where I log all the progress I make on rebooting Space Crusade with modern miniatures.

To replace the Androids of the game, I decided to go for a Necrons Immortal box.

Indeed, I only kept one of the original four models provided with Space Crusade and to be frank, they really look old.

The current Necrons are really impressive miniatures and look stunning compared to the old, static Androids.

Also they feature huge pipes that will be a perfect opportunity to paint smooth gradient effects! Perfect to practice my painting-fu.

Finding the right color scheme won’t be a real challenge here as I’ll go for the standard suggested by the box. the only question is the gradient and glowing effects that need to be done to give a proper rendering. We’ll see what I can achieve there.

Painting Method

No black magic here, I’ll focus on the excellent tutorial of Duncan Rhodes on how to paint a Necron Warrior. Although the miniatures I use are not plain Warrirors, but Immortals, the technique for the armor (which is 90% of it) is the same.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOvql835HcE]

Squad Batch

I did a batch for bootstraping the squad. Once this step was done, I focused on only one mini, in order to finish it entirely to « crack » it down. This way I could really understand how I wanted to paint every part of it, and would then be able to do the remaining three in batch.

This is something I like to do to avoid making a bad decision and having to fix many miniatures… I’ll finish them all only when I’ll be happy with the first one!

First model

When the four immortals were ready with their metallic base (when properly shaded and highlighted) I picked one and started to work on it.

The idea is to finish it in order to understand how to colors work and which scheme I like. I went for the color scheme of the box, trying to reproduce it as good as I could.

So far the progress is good, even though it remains a lot to do for the mini to look finished.

The most challenging part here is the glowing green within the gun. On the box cover it even looks more glowing than what I achieved here. The strategy was to paint all the recesses of that part with Moot Green and the little dots in the center with a darker green (Warpstone Glow). It’s almost impossible to avoid putting green on the black bits of the gun, so it’s a good idea to start with this step before painting in black the gun.

This way we can remove the silver and green mess in one step. Another idea (that I haven’t tested here) would be to paint the recesses in White Scar and glaze them afterwards. Anyway what I did here is good enough I think, for a table top quality.

The pipes are also a challenge, to make the impression of a running fluid flowing inside, it’s important to do a gradient of green with the highlight point in the middle of the pipe. This has been done here with the « two brushes smoothing technique »: a first layer of green is applied on the pipe. Then a brighter green (Moot Green here) is applied and with a second brush with little water, the paint is removed slightly on its edges towards to outside. This creates a nice transition between the two green colors.

The result is not so bad here, although I’d like the base of the pipes to be darker, I’ll do it again, in the same way with a darker green.