How to Paint Nekthyst Dynasty Necrons – Rockfish’s Method

This article is part of a larger series on how to paint Necrons. To return to that series, click here. Necrons have always floated around as a army I was on the edge of getting into from when I got started in the hobby, but they never quite had enough stuff that looked really good to me and I used to hate painting metal. I ended up ordering a Start Collecting box for the army when the new model for Illuminor Szeras was shown off, and then when they later unleashed the floodgates of new models with the launch of 9th edition I was caught up in the wave! I started by priming these models with Leadbelcher spray.

For my scheme all the metal is done in one go; these days I much prefer to just base coat one metallic colour and then just use washes and contrast to build up the colour I want. In this case I wanted a rich dense feel to the metal for which the density of Basilicanum Grey Contrast Paint is just fantastic – It’s effectively multiple coats of nuln in one go! While it is not super obvious in the final product, the Agrax Earthshade helps to give complexity to the tones in the metal that the grey wash does not really give. I will come back later to add a final edge highlight after the drybrush of ironbreaker. I often leave stuff like that to the end as it gives me a chance to clean up mistakes.

After the metal I went around to block in and wash the majority of the conventional colours, I left the blades and other stuff that will be purple until later as I was planning to mix colours and I don’t want to waste paint.

Honestly the technique I use for my purples could probably be done faster just by wet blending instead of mixing each colour together sequentially, but I am not very good at that at the moment! Plus, I am still pretty happy with how it comes out, particularly when these models have a ton of small gems, lenses, and blades. If you are looking to save time it’s worth remembering with stuff like this that even basic layering like this blends together very well on the table top. Even in close up shots kind of gets smoothed out when you have sharp contrasts like the recess colours and edge highlights going on.

I often quite enjoy this step in a scheme, when the most time consuming parts are done and you get the opportunity to just do a flurry of small highlights all over the place and see lots of impact from little effort.

The final step on the necron themselves is to do the extreme edge highlights, I used a common colour for each of metallics and conventional paints to help tie them all together.

I use a relatively lightly coloured base to help have the dark necron pop out against it, be careful when doing stuff like that though as it is easy to have it overpower the model you are trying to showcase!

This article is part of a larger series on how to paint Necrons. To return to that series, click here.