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Hi folks,

 

I finished these Wraiths off today to add to my nascent force of Necrons. The Necrons are angry dead space robots from Games Workshop's 40K universe, although the Wraiths are more like mechanical constructs and were never biological, unlike their masters.

 

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These are some of my favourite models in the entire Necron range, so it was probably unwise to paint them so early in the process! Their fiddliness does mean that doing some basic troops is going to seem like a relief though. It's not that they were desperately hard to paint, but the many limbs and underslung weapons took a fair bit of doing.

 

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The base metal is Alclad, with their clear colours to shade it, and the copper and metal details are all painted with Citadel bar a few final touches using the Vallejo liquid metal range. Other colours (the carapace and weapons) are all from the Citadel range.

 

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The carapace started off as Ionrach Skin, which is very close to IJN grey-green, but I added quite a bit of dirty weathering and then layers of green glazes to increase the saturation. The reds are based around Khorne Red.

 

I think they look quite cool together with the Immortals I did previously, although the Wraiths don't have as much glowing stuff. In particular their eyes are styled after HAL-9000's camera eye, rather than the internal glow that the earlier models had.

 

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I also took some pictures on black with a keylight to pick up the metallic a bit. I still don't have a good setup for black-background photos but hopefully it comes across.

 

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Cheers,

 

Will

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Thanks all!

 

11 hours ago, C&WR said:

How on Earth do you manage to get the glowing effect with the orange?

Apologies, I should've linked to the work-in-progress thread where I went into more detail about it:

 

https://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/235038786-necrons/

 

As usual with this kind of thing, the short answer is "paint" 😛 The long answer is that I painted the eye sockets orange and the eyeballs a lighter orange, then flooded the sockets with a Citadel paint called "Bloodletter". This is a thin but very saturated "glaze" paint in a warm red. Once that was dry, I dotted the pupils with pure white. If you click on this picture:

 

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It'll take you to Flickr where you can download the full-size original and see just how rough and ready it really is close-up.

 

They look brighter than they are because the surrounding parts of the faces are darkened to increase the contrast. You see a lot of miniature painters painting soft glows around bright light sources, and that's cool and all but it's like the light reflecting off fog particles. I wanted to show the light hitting only where it could reach in once bounce, and since the eyes are recessed it can't reach the surrounding face at all.

 

Hope that makes sense!

 

Cheers,

 

Will

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18 hours ago, AndyRM101 said:

It really gives them a lot of personality.

Thanks Andy! I was trying to get them leaning a bit to one side or the other to match the legs. And the face-on-one-side thing ties into Princess Mononoke - these models remind me (distantly) of the forest spirits. The face on the rearing-up one is a spare from a Canoptek Spider, I thought the little claw was a nice detail.

The legs were a bit of a hassle actually - I built the models up as four pieces - tail/base/ball-things, rear thorax/legs, front thorax/legs/face and carapace, and found I was losing track of which went together, so I ended up dotting them with different coloured paint to show the sets.

 

Glad the glowy tips were useful, I'm sure there are other ways to do this, I haven't really painted much glowy stuff before. I was going to say "any" but I guess this counts:

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While I like it, I think the Necron glows came out better, maybe because it was clearer where the light would hit? The glowing runes & nostrils are supposed to be shining from within/molten to some extent, I'm not sure how well that reads.

 

Cheers,

 

Will

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  • 3 weeks later...

One of the best explanations of object source lighting I've read! I know you don't like it, Will, but it's one of my favourite effects. I tend to use it too much- a bit like weathering, it can overpower the mini if it's over egged. You've nailed it, though.

 

(This is me not being jealous, not even a little bit and totally not sulking! 😉)

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22 hours ago, oileanach said:

I know you don't like it, Will, but it's one of my favourite effects.

Ha, sorry, didn't mean to diss it as a technique. I think it can look really good but when I've tried to do the soft glow thing it's never really worked for me. This way I can understand how to paint it so that I'm not annoyed by the result.

 

One day I'd love to do one of those fancy display paint jobs where the shadow and light are dramatically different and it's all focussed around a single light source.

 

W

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I'm really impressed with how you've done your OSL, Will. The technique is often overused or becomes the focus of the entire piece but the way you've used it on your Immortals and Wraiths really enhances the overall look of each figure.

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  • 3 weeks later...

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