"Objects of the Underhive" - Necromunda Terrain II

Deep below the nightmarish, polluted hive cities

of Necromunda, in the twisted, dark tunnels of the Underhive,

rival gangs fight to the bitter end...

~Games Workshop

Salutations friendlies, and welcome to another week on The Art of Caesura!

You can still hear the echos of our footsteps as we explored the bulkheads and scatter terrain littering the claustrophobic Underhive corridors of Hive Primus on Necromunda last week. This week we'll add some of the more exciting elements to this world. 

Let's start with one of the most far out elements: the tentacle! Now for those of you who've been following the blog for a while, we're no strangers to tentacles - okay, that came out weirder than intended...

I initially painted this tentacle the same way as the Conan ones: working my way up from Incubi Darkness, and keeping it darkest on the dorsal surface (the back). When I finished, I painted the manhole Leadbelcher, inked it with Nuln Oil and was getting ready to call it a day. But it just didn't look great. I couldn't put my finger on it at first, but then when I went back to look at my Conan tentacles, they are A LOT more detailed than the Necromunda one. The layering to lighter colours on the ventral surface really brought out all the detail of the suction cups and coarse texture of the flesh on the Conan ones that wasn't present on the Necromunda ones; it left the Necromunda ones looking kinda bland. 

So, I got a little sponge out, thinned out some Ushabti Bone, and created a transition that I think works much better than keeping it a solid colour. 

Now, on to the ammo crates. I haven't read the scenario rules yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are scenarios where you have to grab ammo crates not knowing if they're booby-trapped. With this possibility in mind, I thought it best not to individualize them. 

The other bulkheads, though more detailed with the chevron-door and circular submarine-style "handle", were painted much the same as the scenery from last week. 

For the little shrine-thingy, I painted all bone and parchment elements with Ushabti Bone, and then did all the writing squiggles on the parchment pieces before washing the parchment with Seraphim Sepia and the bones with Agrax Earthshade (don't forget the two little skulls on the back!). I highlighted them both up with Ushabti mixed with Lahmian Medium and then a bit of White Scar. This was a nice little piece and only took about 20min to get looking pretty nice!

The (?melta) bombs then were a little more involved. I spent ages deciding whether I would do the canister part in a steel or copper tone. I went on to paint the grenade piles first and felt that if I painted the metal frame of the timer in a copper that it would get lost in the browny-green I used for the grenades so I painted it steel. Wanting to keep a bit of continuity between the various pieces, I painted the timer part of the melta bombs steel too - which, to keep contrast, made up my mind about what colour to paint the canisters - copper!

I washed the Hashut Copper with Druchii Violet and then Agrax Earthshade. I want to keep a lot of the retro yellow and black hazard stripes of olde, so I painted the wires this way - and you'll see this motif creeping into many of the elements of Necromunda. For the wires, I just painted them Yriel Yellow and then diagonal, evenly-spaced lines of Abaddon Black. I was going to wash and highlight these bad-boys, but I wanted the wires to stand-out, so just left them as-is. I had fun with the screens of the timers. Obviously I originally wanted to actually have numbers counting down but couldn't quite get in there well enough, so painted "alien" symbols on the black screens using Gauss Blaster edge paint before coating the screen with gloss varnish.

Like the tentacle, the computer terminals also required a bit of a re-paint. I originally painted all of their screens green, but then saw a guy on Insta who painted his different colours and it reminded me of the old Doom games' colour-coded doors and keys. For another layer of pop-culture reference, the green computer has the vertical symbols like The Matrix, the blue screen has the "eye" icon from The Talos Principle, the yellow is the Yellow Key from Doom and red is a good ol' skull and cross-bones. 

So that's all of the terrain of Necromunda done, till next time on The Art of Caesura!


Listening: Can't Cheat Karma EP - Zounds
Reading: Saga Book 2 - Brian K. Vaughn
Watching: Santa Clarita Diet


Next Week:

Anung Un Rama...