I recently came across a Facebook post from way back in 2020, when I’d received a boxful of Nexus goodies from Scott. This included a bunch of the old resin pieces. Crates, pillars, barrels, helots, and the old prototype board frames were just begging for paint. I did my best to give them some shine back then, and got a lot of colour on the board if nothing else. While it didn’t look half bad, mostly thanks to me commissioning the helots from local painting service Radiator Marines rather than painting them myself, it was still somewhat underwhelming.
Partly due to my poor photography skills, which haven’t improved much since, to be honest…
But hey, at least there’s a penis scribbled in on one of my dart columns!
Anyway, I dug up the stuff and started having at it, with the first post of this kind, the one focusing on the dart columns, showcasing some of those old paintjobs. The following couple posts will also focus on the results of this repainting endeavour.
With the sorry state of these Nexus crates, I figured going fast and furious at them would be the right choice, so I started with what I thought would be the easiest to tackle… the Not-Quite-Story Cubes. Which you can download from the site for free for your own printing needs and wants. Strong and vivid was the aim here, so The Army Painter Speedpaints were a must.
Paints
I don’t remember the exact colours these were painted with, though I probably used a mix of cheap acrylics and Vallejo to do up their base layers, of which Cavalry Brown was the reddish, and German Camo Brown the brown.
The Nexus crates were one of the first more involved projects I ever tried them on.
I wanted to keep the crates different enough from one another. This would allow me to use them for special objectives I might come up with in games. To this end, I went with khaki, dark red, brown, and brown-black, which you can see lined up above.
1. Prep and layer
I wanted to use Speedpaints primarily, but also regular stuff to bring them up to snuff, and I went with both a direct application of the Speeds as well as trying some grisaille to help bring out the highlights. Also known as slap-chop, this is simply a case of dry brushing ever-lighter tones on the raised areas of a mini in order to allow a brighter colour to show through the aforementioned speedpaint application.
really made the crate pop, so I went heavy with it.
I thoroughly photo-documented my steps so I wouldn’t mix anything up down the line. And ended mixing things up not 24 hours after taking the first batch of pictures.
So, Murder Scene became Slaughter Red.
Apparently things went from blood to worse.
As a general rule, I applied an initial coat of each SP over the crates, then went in with a more diluted one to help pool up the recesses and some of the nooks and crannies where the wood planks came together, such as the crates’ corners. The pigment in these things is awesome and they are a pleasure to work with, so this went about as fast as I thought it would, allowing me to move on to the next step, and one which I love to bits:
2. Dry brushing
I chose another set of colours, and went to town on these in a couple layers for each crate. Both AP and some of my old Citadels were used here, naturally from a dropper bottle and not those horrid, paint-wasting, unwieldy pots they come in.
A pox on all their pots. And their overpriced plastic, too.
After this was done, I dry brushed some more Vallejo Desert Yellow (which I love to bits), and my newly acquired Yellow Green (that I’m quickly growing very fond of and will also feature in the barrel painting post) in order to further bring out the texture on the brown and greenish crate, respectively.
I was going to add some blood splatter to these, but decided against it since the pre-painted crates are already bloodied enough and I can always do that at a later date, after doing some trial and error on other, less important projects.
3. Finish
The Nexus crates were finished with a Vallejo acrylic matte varnish and are awaiting the next possible steps of their glow-up. Whether it’s going to be blood, grafiti, or both, remains to be seen.
That’s it!
As you can see below, finishing these in matte does give them a fairly different look than the shiny, factory-finished ones, so always make sure you use the right kind of varnish to fit your particular take on things. Not just for this project, but also miniatures, in general.
Bears mention that there is also a slight height difference between the old resin molds and the boxed versions. Keep that in mind if you’re a stickler for milimetres. Or an inchoid, whatever.
But wait, there’s more!
Next on the painting block are the pillars, barrels, and aeries. The latter are a fairly involved project including ink markers, baby wipes, and rocks. Stay tuned!
But here’s a quick preview of the pillar work:
In the meantime, let me know if you’d have chosen different colours for the crates and if you’d like me to tackle some grafitti for them and make them look more like some of the Nexus promo shots, for instance:
Hope it inspires!
Cozzy