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How do folks,

Need your help please. I'm painting my Dads Necrons for him and have come stuck with the colour scheme which itself seems quite simple, though to do "next level" is frankly blagging my head. I've taken a zenithal appraoch , with dawnstone, eshin grey, and chaos black as the respective colours, though it just seems too light. I'm nervous of darkening it too much as when it's black, it'll be a bitch to bring back.

So I started thinking about taking a NMM approach. Would this work on the Crons, given how thin and spindly they are? If so, am I using the right colours? Would prefer to stick with GW paints btw, purely because they're easiest for me to source & a have a pretty good collection of them already.

Thanks!

I would be inclined to actually use an Eshin/Dawnstone mix as the top layer rather than dawnstone by itself.

Provided you are decently careful with the final pass it shouldn't be too light, and you could easily use a black glaze to bring it back down.

Thanks for the reply I figured for £8.00 I'd get Wargames Foundry's ready matched set of blacks, I'd have preferred to avoid spending money on variations of what I already have though I guess it'll pay itself off if it enables me to paint to a better standard, faster, without having to worry about getting uniform mixes.

I am still interested in how to approach black nmm though, if you or anyone else has any easy to follow tips on this?

Thanks again

 kitch102 wrote:
Thanks for the reply I figured for £8.00 I'd get Wargames Foundry's ready matched set of blacks, I'd have preferred to avoid spending money on variations of what I already have though I guess it'll pay itself off if it enables me to paint to a better standard, faster, without having to worry about getting uniform mixes.

I am still interested in how to approach black nmm though, if you or anyone else has any easy to follow tips on this?

Thanks again

Black NMM is hard, especially to get right because NMM typically relies on the extreme contrast provided by using pure black and pure white.

My suggestion would be to paint it similar to any standard kind of silver NMM (black to white), but really focusing your transitions on what would be the reflective surface. That way the majority of the surface is black/dark grey, whilst the highlights will give the shine.



So using the sword on the right of this image, rather than a gradual transition from black to grey over the whole length you would need to focus your colours towards the ends of the blade and the bevel/point of the blade. Doing this will give you the reflection, but leave the body of the blade black(ish).

This is an RG scout I did with a black blade, although I used a blue line highlight the concept is the same, its focused on the point and prominent parts of the bevel. It's how I would attempt it.

Cheers Winter. Looks as though NMM is way past my current skill level!

 kitch102 wrote:
Cheers Winter. Looks as though NMM is way past my current skill level!

NMM isn't particularly hard, it just relies on some patience and basic understanding of blending. It's just particularly difficult to do black NMM, as it requires a greater combination of theoretical and practical understanding of the technique.

My suggestion would be to have a crack at something similar. Do a blade in a blue, or even just do it silver. You learn lots by doing in painting, its not always about theory.

NMM on Necrons would take an extremely long time to paint, not really practical for an army unless you have a lot of free time and a couple of years to burn. It's better for display pieces than table top pieces, IMO it doesn't look that good on the table top anyway because it loses it's metallic "feel" when the reflections aren't shifting as they should.

Ok cool - sounds like you just saved me a lot of time lol