Necrons and their endless ranks are a staple of 40k. Luckily, you can paint battle ready Necrons in no time with this simple tutorial.
This army started out in 2019 for a tournament, and quickly expanded to a full collection with the release of the Indomitus starter set and plethora of new models.
Luckily, the scheme is both fast and easy, so you can churn out your battle ready necrons at a very fast pace.
Battle Ready Necrons
The overall idea behind this scheme is to keep everything dark and simple, and have one very bright and bold color. It’s great on Necrons, because they have a lot of wargear and weapons where the glowing look really shines. Pun intended, please don’t kick me off the internet.
Silver
Our model starts on a black under coat. Make sure every nook and cranny in your model is black. We want to leave plenty showing in the recesses to accentuate the shadows.
Next is Gun Metal from the Army Painter. On this army, we use and airbrush to get a silver base coat, leaving plenty of black showing through.
If you are really airbrush-averse, a shaker can or dry brush is a possible alternative.
I’ve done this effect with a shaker can in the past. It works, but the end result is a lot coarser and leaves you with less control. Dry brushing will work out, but it is quite time consuming, even for such a rough technique. As the main goal behind this scheme is speed, other alternatives are best.
Keeping up our fast and bold approach, we use a sponge to add highlights with Shining Silver.
By wiping some of the paint on the sponge and dabbing it around the edges, we get a very basic edge highlight that doubles as battle damage.
When it comes to the sponge technique, less is more. Both in terms of how much paint you put on the sponge, and how much dabbing you do on your model.
Green Details
On our models, most if not all the details are dark green. This includes cloaks, cables and wires.
Start on a Caliban base coat, and highlight with Warpstone Glow. I like to shade this with Nuln Oil, as it cleans up highlights are the little details and leaves the green very dark overall.
Glow
The glow is much much harder to pull off cleanly without an airbrush. It is not impossible, but again, it’s a lot of work for what should be a simple scheme for our battle ready Necrons.
Start with Moot Green, making sure the entire blade is green, and leave some silver showing through the parts you want your model to glow.
Next, highlight the green with Flash Gitz Yellow. This is really to highlight the main green elements, not really on the glow itself. For the glow, we edge highlight those areas with the yellow, because those sharp edges really sell the lighting effect.
Lastly, glaze over your model with thinned down Warp Lightning Contrast. We want one even coat of this across the green, not a heavy coat like a traditional ‘contrast’ would be.
Base
The bases are down in an orange-brown tone, but still on the darker side. This contrasts nicely with the greens, and doesn’t overpowers the glow because it remains dark.
Over black under coat, drybrush doombull Brown, followed by Skrag Brown. If you find this too mono-tone, you can add a very light dry brush of Tau Light Ochre. This is great on larger bases that can be otherwise quite bland.
