Hello! So, despite telling myself I’d have a couple of days without any tabletop hobby after finishing my EC being home alone got the better of me and I’ve got on with my Necromunda gang.
Cracking open the packaging it’s immediately obvious that the kits are really quite complex; there’s loads of customisation (understandable for a game with a significant narrative / campaign element):
Now, my gang is very straightforward – 14 fighters are armed with the same weapons and three more have a different CC weapon. I was worried at first that everyone having the same weapon would mean that there wouldn’t be enough of them on the sprues but actually as all fighters have three weapons there are enough bits to represent at least one of the weapons on every fighter.
I put a new blade on my craft knife and started hacking away. I’ll preface this bit by saying that I don’t really like building models; it’s my least favourite part of the hobby and I’m very slow at it. I found these kits went together easily enough but with one issue:
For someone who has very weak eyesight (If I take my spectacles off I fall over) some of the parts of the kit are extremely small. I’ve been used to fat-headed power armour recently too which doesn’t help. Well almost immediately after the pic above was taken, my knife slipped on a piece of flash and cut through my finger tip and halfway across the nail. I think it’s only because I used a new blade that the injury wasn’t worse but crikey it hurt. Take my advice, don’t economise by trying to use knife blades after they blunt!
Anyway, sob story notwithstanding, I soon had all the bodies and heads assembled and put onto bases:
A couple of things about getting to this stage:
- The more deconstructed the models are when you paint them, the better the paint job. I subscribe to this fully. However, you’ll see from the pic above that I’m fully assembling before I paint. Not because I don’t want a good paint job – I’ve just finished two very long paint jobs and actually just want to see how well I can paint these in a relatively short period of time. Also, with the arms being paired on some of the two handed weapons, keeping them all separate becomes a book keeping exercise.
- The bases. Yeah, this one is a bit trickier. I could (should?) have just pinned the models to wine corks and painted the bases separately. Again, I didn’t. I think this will speed my process up. I haven’t actually thought too hard about how I want to paint the bases yet.
So now it was a case of cutting out the weapons, cleaning them up and test fitting them on different bodies to see how they fitted. I once cut all the pieces off the sprue when building some Bestigor and only then realised that the arms were paired and body specific. Not a single one went together right!
There’s a similar situation with the Necro gang. Not all models are meant to carry one or more of Las rifle, Las pistol, Stiletto knife or Power Sword so it was worth going through all the models to make sure I had poses that fitted with the weapons etc. Even after the dry fitting, there are still some gaps to fill but nothing too crazy:
With all the gaps filled the next stage is priming. I do this with my airbrush and I do this with two coats. Why? You know how you always find more mould lines after you’ve started to paint a model? That’s because the paint gives all the raised areas a slight highlight and its annoying. I prime once and this shows up all the mould lines I missed:
These get scraped back and I lay another coat of primer down. I’ll guarantee there are still mould lines on the models – it’s one of the things I’m really bad for (and one of the reasons I don’t like modelling that much). But this way I do as well as I can.
The last process I include in the modelling stage is a light sketch (zenithal highlighting). As with a lot of my painting, this is something I really picked up from Vince and his Hobby Cheating series. Look it up for more info but ultimately it’s a case of:
- Undercoating the whole model in black
- Airbrushing at a ~45 degree angle with a mid grey
- Airbrushing with white at a perpendicular right angle to the model (ie directly from above)
This initial light sketch will make painting highlights (and shadows) much easier and will generally help me get to a higher standard much quicker.
Ok so that’s where I’ve got to. I’ve got my aesthetic and now I’ve got some models built. Time to get the paintbrushes out!