WIP: Necron Army - Part 8: The Ghost Ark

It's the project that won't end! I intended to finish this thing (and thusly, the battleforce box) this weekend, but my newly minted parenthood intervened. Progress pics after the break.

This is a fun kit. It's a cool design, and it breaks into clean sub assemblies for detailing before final construction. I was worried about the amount of yellow I'd chosen, as it might look like a school bus, but stealing Monkey's scheme was definitely the right idea.

--Aaaand I've just seen his C'tan conversion. Holy fuck me, this guy. Goddamn.

Anywho... back to the Ark. I airbrushed the the tops of the ribs yellow, and then masked them.

With the yellow protected, I applied an airbrush coat of vallejo gunmetal, and then gunmetal and black in the recesses around the spine. When using metallics, it's important to vary the values around the join areas, to keep everything from looking monotone. A great example of this is Deet's Stormraven.

When you remove the masking tape, this is the result. there are some areas that need to be retouched around the color break, but this is easily fixed with a brush.

I used the same technique on the body. I sprayed the top vallejo gold yellow, and then masked it.

Once it was masked, I painted the power core with a base of white, and then vallejo scorpion green. I try to airbrush the greens and yellows whenever possible, as they are difficult to brush paint and get a smooth finish.

Here, I've applied the gunmetal, as well as the shaded gunmetal to accentuate the shapes in the model. If you look closely, you can see that I've used liquid mask to cover the green in the power core.

When painting the smaller parts, I gang them. Here, you can see the gauss flayers taped in a group to allow for easy base coating.

And here are the mounts. The place where they join the sprue will be hidden in final assembly, so I've left them connected. I can easily prime, base, wash and dry brush them all at once. I'll snip them off once I'm ready to assemble the model.

Here's an example of how I paint the power cores. I spray vallejo scorpion green, and then shade the edges with vallejo sick green. Then, using a brush, I apply black, then gunmetal. I wash the model with GW agrax earthshade, then VERY CAREFULLY dry brush gunmetal to avoid touching the green orb. lastly, I apply GW 'ard coat to make it shine.

That's it for this week. Next week I'll apply an oil wash to all the parts, apply edge lighting and then assemble - wish me luck!

-trip