Necromunda Orange - Done Enough

09.06.2024

Since last time in Necromunda land I made an effort to try and be consistent with my painting for a while. After work I would take a break for an hour or 2, and then I would turn on the radio and paint for what would turn out to be 2-4 hours. For 2 weeks I did this. I got a lot done, and I also learned that how I paint can lead to text neck, or maybe I should call that Necromunda Neck?

I had gotten the 1st pass of orange on all the buildings and started the roofs at the end of the last post. I had more roofs, some platforms I'd forgotten about, and then some walkways and ladders that I had completely forgotten about. Oh, and it seems most of the time a 2nd coat of orange is needed to really get the coverage I need. And add in some other colors because just white-ish and orange is boring. By the way, I'm not the steadiest hand so go back and cover up errant brush strokes with some white-ish.

I didn't know the above was the plan when I started, but it turned out that way. It sounds like hell, but it was actually kind of nice. After work, with the radio on, I was able to honestly turn my brain off and just go about painting. When I normally turn my brain off, everything just lurks in the background and I don't attention. This time - off.

There aren't really any interesting stories or tidbits from this round of painting. No big discovery. No big mistake or learning experience. Currently, I think all of this is about 90% done. I need to add some weathering to help cover those errant brush stroke fixes. While putting everything together for some of the beauty shots below, I didn't even notice those cover ups. After dedicating a big chunk of time to painting this set, I'm ready to switch gears for a little while. As such, I'm calling Space:199-Necromunda Done Enough, For Now. There's some more stuff I want to add in (later on), so revisiting will be a good time to add in the weathering.

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Necromunda Orange

08.17.2024

Back in May I posted that my batch of Necromunda buildings had finally been assembled. And then they fell off the face of the planet, evidently. Glue, gap-filling, sanding, and then more sanding. I knew I needed a little break from it, but I didn't expect it to be this long. And honestly, I haven't been hands-off the buildings for 3 months. I've had lots of little figuring it out moments.

My fairly simple color scheme I last mentioned was a classic US sci-fi of white-ish base color with orange highlights. Think Space:1999, but maybe reverse the base and highlights. I think I last saw this in The Martian and liked it enough it stuck with me and I thought it would be a good alternative to post-apocalyptic grimdark.

Eschewing pure-white, Citadel Wraith Bone seemed a good white, kind of with some built-in age/weathering. But first, instead of just priming everything white like I always do, I finally got a little smarter and started with black. This would give shadows to the nooks and crannies I would invariably miss, and I got try out some zenithal priming with the Wraith Bone because I've never done that on non-people. Step one: a little over 2 cans of Citadel black primer. Ok, that was more cans than I was expecting. And I only gotten 1 can of Wraith Bone. Without going into detail, I then learned of 2 stores locally that carried said Wraith Bone - and both are closer than the Warhammer Store. Step two: a little over 2 cans of Citadel Wraith Bone, zenithalled. To be honest, I should have gotten better coverage with my zenithal layer, there are spots where way too much black still shows through. But after looking at it for a while (off and on for a couple of months, after all), I kind of like it. Maybe that'll be my style?

For Step three, I had to find the right orange for orange highlights. I called upon my close personal friend Charles G. for help here, because I suck at picking shades of a color. I knew I didn't want bright, vibrant orange. I took a couple of the wooden blocks I use for paint handles and used my still-had-paint 3rd can of Wraith Bone to spray all the sides. Then I took samples of various orange and applied here and there - I think there were 21 different colors by the end. The winner ended up being Army Painter Warpaint Molten Lava!

My main idea for adding those orange accents was an identifier for each building - a letter or number - and then an orange stripe around the building that was the height of that identifier. Via Amazon, I picked up ¼" letter stencils. I can add A-E on the buildings. I knew a brush wasn't really going to work with filling in the stencils, so for the 2nd time in.... at least 3 years, I was going to use my airbrush. With ample masking around the stencil and wondering how much to thin Molten Lava, I test sprayed the "A" and it turned out ok. Since I was on a roll, I added the other stencils for B-E and their associated heavy masking, and airbrushed away. By the time I removed all the stencils, the letters took pretty well, There was a little marring here and there from where templates took away a little Wraith Bone when I pulled them off, but overall I was happy.

Here we enter the first really long pause. My idea for the orange stripe was centered vertically on the building wall. The letter for each building is also orange, but I wanted to leave a little white gap between the stripe and letter. The first problem was that my letters weren't centered. They were fairly low if you were looking at the vertical alignment. Looking where that would leave the stripe across the rest of the walls, I would have to mask over a lot of greebly bits on the low side. Masking tape on irregular surfaces doesn't really work well. While testing out some masking approaches, I came across another problem (what number am I on?). There are 8 walls per building thanks to shallow angles. Going with high/low masking, the walls also angle inward. Those straight lines I was attempting to mask - nowhere near straight any more.

I started thinking of other options for the stripe. Maybe only half as high? Offset higher? A thin stripe? 2 thin strips? Vertical stripe where there's no greebly bits? I didn't like any of these ideas. Finally, I took one of the buildings and just asked myself what I could pull off with my skill level? There's some parts I could just use to highlight the orange. Some parts that are always on the top of the wall, and some gear/screw looking things near the bottom. I tried painting one, and the brush strokes afterward were horrible. Looks like another job for the airbrush. Which meant another round of masking. Lots and lots of masking. If I had planned this approach ahead of time, I would have painted the orange bits and then masked them off while I painted everything else Wraith Bone. But no, this is figuring it out on the fly.

Masking the building took a while, as I was applying tape to pretty much the whole building, and then covering up anything in the interior where some pray might seep in. Additionally, there were parts glued in, sticking outward from where I was going to spray. These had some extra masking added on, which I tried to tape to where it wouldn't block the spray from all angles. Finally, I did a test spray on the building and hit all the parts to highlight orange!

And it was pretty much crap (which I'm going to lay a lot of blame on my novice airbrush skills). The coverage was such that even after 2 coats with the airbrush, it still needed another coat - at least. My masking wasn't straight in places. My masking covered parts that should have been painted in places. Those parts sticking out were I tried not to block the spray... blocked the spray.

The time masking + quality of airbrushing wasn't where I wanted. Again, it was time to revisit what my skill level could do. Not thinning the paint as much would cut down on brush streaks. I could just mask around the bits that need painting to help keep my lines straight. Even then, it'll still probably take 2 coats. Maybe more. Using the airbrushed building as my moving forward test - as even the airbrushed spots needed another coat of touching up, I re-masked just the areas needed and tweaked my mixture of thinner and orange.

This time, not crap. After 1 coat over the airbrush, it looked like this might work. And masking really helped in a couple of awkward angles where the tape blocked an errant stroke of orange. What followed was meant to be a sequence of masking a building, then painting it while taking breaks to mask the next so that when Building A was painted, Building B would be masked and ready to paint. What ended up happened was that I got on a roll of enjoying masking (that makes no sense, but it happened). I would mask the top row bits of all the buildings, which would get me used to any quirks. Then when all of those were done, I moved to the bottom row and got used to those quirks. Before I knew it, the 4 remaining buildings were masked.

And masked they sat for a week or two. I don't know why I was putting painting off. Then Friday night, around 8:00, I had the table set up and started to paint with Def Leppard in the background. Eventually Prince was in the background. I found myself in the zone with a brush tip that was holding it's shape and a paint-thinner ratio that was just working. All the masked bits were painted with 2 coats. There were other bits I wanted a little orange on which I hadn't masked but were free-hand capable, so I continued on. A little after midnight, everything I wanted orange was orange.

There's still more to do, and honestly probably a couple more orange pieces per building, but the standard/uniform parts to be orange are. Along the way, I'm no longer scared of the airbrush. At one point, even after ultrasonic cleaning, the brush was clogged. I took the airbrush more apart than I had since taking the class where I learned how to take it apart and put it back together. It took a while to get rid of the clog as I was missing some handy tools I've since ordered from Amazon, but the highlight was noticing how the airbrush action didn't feel right with the clog, and then once I had everything back together and unclogged, I could tell the difference in the smoothness of the action. More importantly, I knew why/where the difference was caused. This type of thing is common knowledge for anyone that's used an airbrush after cleaning up a clog, but secretly it's a weird quirk or phobia that lends to why I buy so much stuff that stays in the shrinkwrap.

The next hurdles to figure out are how to clean up the little mistakes atop the Wraith Bone, and just how much weathering am I going to do?

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