3d-printable terrain for all your samurai wargaming needs
| << Printing and assembling the Energy Monolith 2020-07-20 | Necrontyr Energy Monolith available NOW! >> 2020-07-24 |
The new Necrontyr Energy Monolith is coming very, very soon, and so it seems useful to jot down some notes on one way to paint this fairly large piece of terrain up!
The most important thing to suggest is to paint it BEFORE final assembly. The interior of the monolith is quite a complicated geometric shape, and although it is possible to get brushes into all the nooks and crannies, it's not all that easy. So I'd recommend doing the internal painting first, and then glue it together in stages.
Here's how I did mine....
£ The monolith comes in ten parts, and I gave all of them a spray undercoat of matt black, which also works as the basecoat too.
£ The plasma ball section has several tendrils of plasma energy which reach to other sections of the model, and I wanted to make sure that the area around each tendril was suitably lit.
I found that the best way to achieve this was to put a dot of paint on the section below, wherever each tendril touched. Numbering each of the quarters was also helpful, so they would line up correctly later on.
£ Next I gave the support columns a basecoat of gold and then heavy black washes, because these would also need to have green glow reflected on them later, so they needed to be done now.
£ Next was the tricky bit! I started with an airbrush and white paint, by spraying small blobs over the top of each of the marks where the tendrils would touch. A small airbrush works quite well for getting in to the narrow spaces of the base section, too.
And then my airbrush died! Damn.
So I switched to a rattlecan of matt white spray, and sprayed white over the central plasma ball and surrounding areas, wherever the glow of the plasma would reach. I tried to be reasonably neat, but overspraying slightly didn't worry me too much.
£ With the hard part completed, I switched to an old brush and painted over the white with the most neon green I could find (an old Scorpion Green, by GW). You don't need to be too careful here, because the green paint looks good over the nearby black areas, too, as extra glow.
£ This was the final section to be "greenified". It might look weird while you're painting it, but have some faith, and it'll look good in the end!
* The plasma ball in the centre is smoother on the final model, than in this photo. This was a prototype print, and I hadn't noticed the sphere was low-resolution until it had printed.
£ With the green glow just about done, I glued those sections together, and started adding some gold to the runic sections at the top, but only on the inside. It's easier to paint the inside sides before gluing.
£ This was the last big part to paint - a gentle drybrush with Leadbelcher (dark silver), using a large 2" paintbrush. Note that you should mainly aim to drybrush from side to side, because if you drybrush top to bottom it will highlight the print lines.
£With all that done, the gold strips were painted and then darkened with some heavy black washes, and then the runes highlighted again with gold to pick them out.
And finished!
Final pics are coming tomorrow, with an official release this weekend.... just in time for Warhammer 9th Edition's release!
| << Printing and assembling the Energy Monolith 2020-07-20 | Necrontyr Energy Monolith available NOW! >> 2020-07-24 |
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