So, in a fit of COVID induced nostalgia I’ve found myself sucked (back) into Necromunda. I must say that the new boxed set, Dark Uprising, is a pricey beast, but it feels justified for the outrageous amount of plastic included in it.
I was casting around for a project to sink my teeth into and somehow stumbled on to the fact that GW had released a new edition of Necromunda recently. Given how disrupted 2020 has been, I thought it would be good to jump back into a game I had loved in my more formative (gaming) years. The large amount of terrain and two gangs also promised to have plenty of things to build and paint whilst stage four lockdown continued in Melbourne.
Initial Gang
I decided to start by painting the Enforcers (although Delaque are my first love, I thought I’d try a newer gang to start with until I got a feel for the game), and had the likely unoriginal idea of painting them as a crew of Judge’s 2000AD style. These were almost exclusively painted using GW contrast paints over a black and white zenithal ‘sketch’, making the process relatively quick and easy. I think they look pretty good, and certainly have that bright comic book style colouring which will contrast nicely with my grimdark terrain.
Terrain
On to the terrain. This is built straight out of the box following the instructions. The kits themselves are super detailed and have plenty of small details already including the battle damage I would’ve added otherwise. After building I primed with some cheap black rattlecan spray which turned out to be a mistake as it ended up peeling off, whether due to mould release residue on the models, the paint itself or some other factor I’m not sure, but I ended up having to strip all of it back downto plastic and starting again.
After repriming and then base coating everything dark grey with the airbrush I set about picking out the details and doing sponge chipping over each piece to start dirtying them up. I used an old pot of Chardon Grantie Citadel paint for the initial sponging and then roughly painted inside these ‘chips’ with metallic silver paint (maybe Boiler Black or Pig Iron by P3). Once all the acrylic paints were on the pieces I gave everything a coat of gloss varnish (after which I’m running dangerously low on the Pledge One Go floor polish I purchased 10+ years ago… ).
After allowing an appropriate amount of drying time (actually, they sat around for two or three weeks due to me having other priorities), I sat down on a pleasant Saturday morning and mixed up some oil paints to create a wash. I then slathered it all over each piece, going back over with a makeup sponge to remove any wash that pooled too much. This was then set aside and left to dry for 24 hours before I revisited and used the aforementioned makeup sponges dipped in white spirits to clean up any of the wash on the pieces I wasn’t happy with.
After this, I fired up the airbrush again and gave the lights a light coat of yellow paint around the lights on the walls to give them a little more pop. Then it was a simple matter of giving everything a light coat of Testors dullcote to take the shine off from the gloss varnish at which point we called it done and packed it all away into a box until lockdown ends.
Note: I just wrote all the preceding commentary on how I did the terrain before realising I didn’t have any WIP photos… If you’re interested in seeing some WIP photos illustrating my decriptions of how I painted this terrain let me know in the comments and I’ll paint up some more terrain (I have the new gang stronghold in the mail).
Conclusion
So I’m ready to play a game of Necromunda now, with a relatively full table of terrain and a painted gang ready to head downtown and beat up drunks. Now that lockdown is easing here in Melbourne, I’m looking forward to getting the dice clattering across the table again (and cursing their outcome), so hopefully the judges can get out there and play cops for bad soon.
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