Tabletop Thursday: Dark Mechanicus and C’Tan Part 1

While I’m still painting up my Orks, I’m holding on to the pictures while I’m finishing up one of the big pieces I’m working on. So in the interim I’m showing some WIPs of some of the miniatures I’ve painted previously. Specifically, some of the Dark Mechanicus Skitarii and Transcendent C’Tan from my 2017 Armies on Parade entry, Assuming Direct Control.

The first thing I knew was that within my army, I’d need a ton of scarabs. Scarabs come in two sizes. The big scarabs come in about four (or is it eight?) per Necron box, while the really tiny ones come in a handful within the Necron Tesseract vault. That’s wayyyy too little for what I was gonna use them for, so it was obvious that I was going to have to cast them. I wanted to do something easy, so I figured that push-molds would be sufficient.

The first try was with green stuff, but it was an abysmal failure.

Second try I went with instamold. Instamold is a great easy mold alternative. I’ve used it before, and honestly it should have been my first option, but I didn’t have any extra sets of instamold and I didn’t want to melt down my old brick instamold molds. But it had to be done. 🙁

Second try was so easy it was embarrassing. And as you can see the scarabs came out really well too. From then on for the next few weeks whenever I did any sculpting I’d throw the excess green stuff into the push molds.

Sooner or later I literally had a proper swarm of scarabs.

For my Assuming Direct Control C’tan, I wanted it to look like a possession. Like the C’tan was literally coming out of a hapless Skitarii trooper, with the scarabs swarming out of a hole underneath. The hole was (amazingly enough) just a 30mm round-lip base. You can see the mix of the big and small scarabs. I also used some of the uglier casts as the ones coming out of the hole. Good excuse to cut off the shitty bits.

The Skitarii trooper was much tougher. Models don’t come in a floaty-arched-back pose, so it was a huge number of kitbashes, with a lot of cutting and reposing besides. Just off the top of my head, I used bits from tempestus scions, skitarii troops, as well as the sicarian infiltrators. Especially hard was finding the open hand pose. In the end though, I think the results were pretty good.

The hole in the middle of the torso is to pin the C’tan to.

What C’tan? This one.

Next week: Paint!