If you ever thought that painting Warhammer 40k minis was getting too easy, then boy have we found a new challenge for you. Macis Giorgio of Liguria, Italy, has perfected a technique for making his Necrons look like videogame models with missing texture files, with an added optical illusion that mimics chromatic aberration from a display monitor. I asked him how – and why – he made this madness work.
“I’m fond of doing odd or strange painting on my miniatures”, Giorgio says, “I’m proud of seeing them stand out from the rest of the armies I see around”. And boy does his Necron Doomscythe, “the blurry croissant”, stand out!
The paint scheme is an optical illusion, mimicking a monitor attempting and failing to display a crisp white and black grid. If you want to emulate this look, “prime it white, because painting white is gonna be a bigger pain then the rest of the model”, Giorgio says – he made the error of painting another model black first, and has vowed “never again”.
“With some thin masking tape, place it carefully on the model so that you are able to create a first straight horizontal line, and so on with the first vertical line” – with these guidelines you’ll gradually, painstakingly create a hollow square grid.
“You should definitely use a very thin paint brush, a 3/0 should do the trick”, he says. This is the most challenging part of the process, since “doing very thin lines of paint seems easy, but it’s not”. And with a brush that small, “the heat dries 60% of the paint before reaching the model”. “Creating the smaller squares on the weapons, edges, and the middle horizontal part of the model is harder – you’ll probably be repainting some of them again and again”.
Once you’ve created your grid, and you’ve filled out your black squares, “the interesting part, the blurry effect, is quite a simple thing to do because all you need are four colours: red, yellow, blue, and azure”. You’ll create a red vertical stripe on the right hand side of each white square, then place a yellow stripe to the left of the red stripe. Then you line the left-hand side of the squares with a blue vertical stripe, and then add an azure stripe just to the right side of that.
“It’s simple on paper”, Giorgio says, “but doing it by hand is another thing entirely”. The Necron Doomscythe is only the most recent model that he has painted in this scheme: he first attempted the scheme with a C’tan Shard of the Deceiver, which “was spot on, since this effect deceives your eye into thinking that it’s blurred”. He’s painted a Lokhust Destroyer and a Destroyer Lord as well.
It’s an incredible commitment to making his Warhammer 40k faction really stand out on the tabletop. I’m sure that any competitive advantage he gets from giving his opponents a migraine is purely coincidental.
If you’ve got a cool paint scheme that you’re proud of, come and share it in the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
