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This weekend I'm going to be tackling a pair of Monoliths and I've never painted anything quite like them before. From the looks of things it has lots of flat panels and not much in the way of detail, and I'm afraid of ending up with a big blue or silver box with some green plasticy bits on it - so how should I paint it?

Each Monolith belongs to a 'wing' of my army (Warriors & Immortals/Flayed Ones & Wraiths & Pariahs/Tomb Spyders & Scarabs/Destroyers & Heavy Destroyers) and each 'wing' has its own colour scheme. The Warriors/Immortals group is a dark metallic blue and some minor mithril silver highlighting around the place. The Tomb Spyder/Scarab wing is Bolt Gun metal with Mithril Silver and Gold highlights and panelling. The Destroyer Wing is metalling Red with probably gold highlights/panelling, and the Flayed One will be Gold with white details.

I'll be painting the Warrior/Immortal (blue) and Spyder/Scarab (silver) Monoliths this weekend, and I doubt the standard trick of 'spay black, heavy dry brush, light dry brush, colour details' will work.

What should I do?

Do you want it to look different than GW's?
or are you going with that?



*edit well kinda hard to work without knowing what color you were thinking about.

It's a block of plastic. It really isn't that hard. In fact, it's the easiest vehicle I've ever painted. Much more so than, say, a defiler or a ravager.

As to the colour scheme, you might have some trouble getting a good covering with a metallic colour. For the blue one, try a base of shadow grey or maybe even mordian blue, and the silver one is a piece of cake. Silver seems to take better than gold or tin bitz.

I'd add another couple of intermediate shades to the drybrushing, perhaps starting with a non-black (midnight blue/scorched brown) undercoat.. being more adventerous, try painting em in blues/greys then metalicizing over that with a transparent pearl/interference shade.. Alternately I'd sugest masking off and individually painting every single panel..

When I did mine in sandstone, I started with a spraycoat of Bleached Bone, then inked the entire thing with fleshwash, and drybrushed back through the shades of brown to Bleached Bone again, and it picked up the detail reasonably well, despite being just 2-3 shades

Wow. That looks AWESOME.

I also noticed the heiroglyphs.

So you know, I have yet to put any of them together. I intend to take them off the sprue, clean the mould lines and whatever, and then paint whatever parts I can before putting it together.

Cheese Elemental wrote:It's a block of plastic. It really isn't that hard. In fact, it's the easiest vehicle I've ever painted.

The fact that it's a big plastic box is precisely why I'm wondering how to paint it. It's not like a Russ or Land Raider where there are defined parts and you can see that one bit's a track and another a turret - the Monolith is lump, and I'm worried that just painting it blue will make it look like a blue lump with no definition.

As for the blue, it's a Vajello (SP??) dark metallic blue that we mixed with white paint (a lot of it to brighten it up), sky blue and some mithril silver. So it's already a mix of things rather than a straight metallic.

Lanceradvanced:

Cool Monolith. There aren't a lot of 'intermediate' shades for this blue as it's quite dark already. Not a lot of room between 'black' and 'dark metallic blue lightened a little with heaps of white that didn't work 100% perfectly so it's still quite dark'.

Still, the help is apprecaited even if I have no idea what you mean by 'interference shade'.

Are you going to use a spray gun?

I like this one : o canadaaaaa~

My friend has the GW hand flamer airbrush, and we're painting them over at his place this Saturday.

H.B.M.C. So you know, I have yet to put any of them together. I intend to take them off the sprue, clean the mould lines and whatever, and then paint whatever parts I can before putting it together.

I would advise to build the main form of the monolith first as the kit fits together like common sense and the bureaucratic process.
You can reach everything with a brush if you put together the walls, floor and center and roof and the backs of the corner tips.
of course in order to do this you will have to mount the stairs and guns
this will allow you green-stuff and smooth the seams without having to repaint over repaired ill fitting joints
leave off the side arcs, the gem holder, the rear arc, the portal and the door panel and paint separately

as for the painting, specifically
photos of modern sculpture that use simple geometric shapes are good to work from if you want to go with a 'miniature style', which is hard to pull off without it looking like a toy
the painting approach which I prefer is to paint it like a building/terrain feature
historical modeling magazines would be much more helpful for painting tips for this style

also, weathering is a easy way of adding depth to and flatly painted model

I'd say the airbrush is the best bet, followed by a stipple approach if you're not going to do that.

perhaps some of the techniques mentioned here might help: http://www.coolminiornot.com/forums/viewthread.php?tid=31535&page=1

The weathering stuff looks applicable.

lots of flat surface areas means its pretty fun to paint and you have a great surface for freehand


if your doing a basic job then go for a standard metal colour to match your amy, paint all the lines between pannels with white, then use a watered down colour (blue, red, green) to paint over the white, give it a glowing effect after 2-3 coats, and if you then water it down further and paint the edging to the lines it gives it an even better glowing effect.
then you can have some fun with the flat surface.
easy way: find some pics of a necron pattern and paint those onto it (faded down)
hard way: design your own free hanf image or pattern and use that.

As much as i like the painting in this thread I think the monolith is pug ugly

EDIT: and that cheap platic green thing Ughhh

My suggestion for making the monoliths look good with your scheme would be to paint the corners as a standard colour for each - black highlighted at the edges of the blocks or with a marble pattern - and paint the detail with the colour you're after.

That way you can use your current technique on the detail parts, end up with some cohesiveness between the Monoliths and you have something to break up the expanse of metal on the field.

LunaHound wrote:
I like this one : o canadaaaaa~

Has that been colour altered? The 'crystal' is orange not green.

see the crystal in that one llos like glass a lot more pleasing

Lanceradvanced:

Cool Monolith. There aren't a lot of 'intermediate' shades for this blue as it's quite dark already. Not a lot of room between 'black' and 'dark metallic blue lightened a little with heaps of white that didn't work 100% perfectly so it's still quite dark'.

Still, the help is apprecaited even if I have no idea what you mean by 'interference shade'.

Try going a shade lighter on the blue, perhaps, break with the colors scheme just a hair since he monoliths will be the eye catching pieces, in the army..

Interference Paints, are transparent iridescent paints, that are usefull for either tinting metalics or metalizing non-metalics

http://painting.about.com/od/artglossaryi/g/definterference.htm
http://liquitex.com/Products/paintinterference.cfm

I did the Metailic Purples, Blues and Greens on my EC's, with them..
http://lanceradvanced.deviantart.com/art/Emperor-s-Children-Rhino-82948151
http://lanceradvanced.deviantart.com/art/Emperor-s-Children-Dread-113328398

If it were me painting them i'd do something like this:-Using the monolith from the dark metallic blue wing as an example: start by painting the whole thing in that colour (but leaving the recesses between the panels black) then on each panel feather the colour at the edges with layers of your dark metallic mixed with mithril, keep doing this outwards so you have a constant gradient of colour until you reach the edge of the panel, you want the edge to be almost mithril but not quite. then give the whole model 2 coats of thin blue ink, and highlight the edges of the panels with fine lines of mithril silver. for the red one do the same thing but replace blue with red and mithril with gold.

Hope this helps.

I have two monoliths & I opted to just go for a Boltgun Metal base coat, picked out the corners & vanes in Shining Gold, washed with Chestnut Ink (or Ogryn Flesh these days) over the gold & then added some decals to taste.

The green plastic crystal & portal I painted Snot Green, then gave them a 50/50 highlight of Snot Green/Skull White.

If you go for the metallic look then I'd reccomend a black spray paint undercoat. This is in keeping with the rest of my Necron army overall colour scheme & I think it looks pretty nifty. Your mileage may vary, of course!

Arguably there is no right or wrong way to paint a 'lith. I did moot going for an all over Chaos Black basecoat with some Shining Gold highlights, light Codex Grey highlighting on the raised edges & a coat of Gloss Varnish but I wanted my army to tie in together.

Kilkrazy wrote:
Has that been colour altered? The 'crystal' is orange not green.

Yes sir! i think it looks cool like that though