Wednesday, January 14, 2009

FtW Basing Contest: Necron Conversion on Scratch Built Base

Long term readers of Warpstone Flux should have zero trouble spotting which is my entry in to the FtW basing contest. Hence, there's little point in keeping it a secret any longer since it is not against the rules to go public with it.

From the beginning, I knew that I wanted a base that the miniature would interact with. I have had a go with this kind of idea before with my blue horror that is coming out of a pink one on its base. I eventually settled on a necron that is heaving itself out of water and on to a rusted platform.

The ingredients list is pictured above. Alongside the necron, I've used a plastic sprue stick, a chaos marine arm (I found that the hand was shaped well for grasping the support strut), a metal grill for the basis of the rusted platform (I picked this item up at a train hobby exhibition), and a number of paperclips for pinning the bits together.

The picture below shows the model and base being assembled in various stages of completion. The first step was to chop off one of the necron's legs at the knee (don't worry - the part will go to good use as a bionic leg on a chaos space marine) and glue the torso on to the legs. The sprue "strut" was glued in to a hole made in the base and the metal grill was glued horizontally to the strut (a small horizontal incision was made in the strut to better hold the grill in place).

The second leg of the necron was also cut at the knee, hip and the ankle, but this time the parts were kept and simply repositioned. I spent some time figuring out a number of positions until I settled on the foot being placed flat on the grill with the leg coming up behind it. It is still a relatively natural pose (for a necron). I realized at this stage that the model would require some greenstuff (or in my case, milliput - standard yellow) to fix up the joints that I had earlier chopped.

The hand of the chaos marine was chopped from its arm and positioned to grasp the strut. The necron arm (that already ended in a stump) was then glued close to the hand. Again, milliput was then used to create (and disguise) the join at the wrist between the necron stump and marine hand. The gauss weapon needed some filing to remove the remnant of the necron hand (that the stump should insert into!) and fingers that were on it and make it look right. Finally, a liberal amount of milliput was used to create wave effects on the base of the model.

After a suitable time curing (24hrs), the miniature was painted. The paint work followed the Verdus Prime necron scheme that I devised earlier with one critical exception. Instead of using pure skill white everywhere as the base coat, I worked up to skull white using grey as the basecoat. It has given the miniature much more depth and allowed a proper highlighting of the ridges on the model to be done. The strut and the grill were painted to look rusted. Meanwhile, the milliput on the base used various shades of blue with drybrushings of lighter blues and whites to make it look like waves breaking in the shallows. The pictures below were taken on blue bathroom tiles to accentuate the watery theme of the miniature. This miniature took a long time to assemble and paint up, but was rather fun to create. Hope that you enjoy the final result.

4 comments:

eriochrome said...

Nice, Who would have thought that Necrons were that flexible. Slow but Flexible.

Matt said...

So yeah i dated this gymnast once....wait wrong comment. He looks really great. The base/character interaction is sweet. Good work, but also CURSEs to you as I am also in the competition. All in good sport mate.

Admiral Drax said...

Nice idea; great execution.

Well done

- Drax.

PS: are you still in university? only the verification word is "didexam". Which would be apt. If you were.

jabberjabber said...

Hi Folks -- thanks for all the positive comments & support! And, good luck with your own bases if you're also entering the contest. I'm looking forward to seeing them!

PS to Drax - yes, I'm at university, but not as a student :)

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