Sunday, February 5, 2012

Glacial progress on Necron Terrain

Well another long absence between posts is over and I’m back with a little hobby progress.  It’s usually only when I see the time gap between updates that I truly get a sense how far my hobby has slipped on my overall priority list.  Oh, well, another year and my youngest will be in pre-school and maybe I can put a little more time into things.

Anyhow, moping aside over Christmas I did manage to move my Necron terrain ahead.  First, I’ve been experimenting with color schemes.  I originally wanted to go with a black base and yellow lettering from the Dawn of War Dark Crusade PC game, but I had to abandon this for a couple of reasons.  First, it was terribly time consuming to color in all of the glyphs with paint.  I tried pens, but the rough texture of the blocks was chewing up pens too fast.  I had to use a traditional paint brush, which just wasn’t fun.  It felt too much like a chore.  As much of a problem though was the look.  The blocks are weathered like stone and the black look wasn’t very complimentarily.   The DOW green on black seems to look like some sort of alien metal, not stone, and it just wasn’t working for me on the weathered blocks.  Here’s a pic of one of the black side on my test Stele before I ran out of patience.  The outside row of glyphs only has one coat of green, the inside has two.

Moving on I defaulted back to tomb kings with a traditional sandstone paint job and a brown wash.  On the up side this is easy as cake (It took less than 20 minutes to do the other side versus an hour to do the black side) and looks good for tabletop quality.  On the down side it doesn’t fit my armies color scheme or any of my other exiting terrain.  Another problem is that the wash really highlights the differences between the Hirst blocks and my blocks.  Dang it.  I’ll try one more with a dark grey base,  a black wash in the letters and grey highlighting and see how that goes.  Here’s a pic of the sandstone side.

In the mean time, I’ve been casting away at a larger project.  This is a modification of the temple design from the Hirstart’s website.  I’ve scaled it down a little and replaced the entire hieroglyphic block with the Necron Glyphs.  The other big change is to ditch the fluted molding detail at the tops of the slopes.  I got a comment from a forum that they made the structures look too “human”.  After a while I think I agree.  Maybe it’s not too human, but certainly Egyptian than I wanted.  So I dropped them in favor of some weathered flat tiles.  These don’t quite match the blocks but they’re close enough to work for this piece.  Once I’ve settled on a color scheme she’s ready for a paint job.  The temple is built in five sections for front, back, sides and the floor for easier storage. 





I learned going full scale that the glyph blocks still aren’t right.  I need to do some heavier weathering with cracks, and flaking so that they more closely match the Hirstart blocks.  I’ve done some test carving and it’s too delicate to do with the sand blaster, so I need to take a small hobby knife to the work which is slow and time consuming.  I’m hoping to have the set ready for one final mold by the middle or end of the month.

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