A day at the barrels… Or that’s how long this whole thing took. Well, not an entire day, just one sitting. So I’m not kidding about the “quickly painting the Nexus barrels” bit.
Yup, it’s everyone’s favourite snack, toxic waste!
In fairness, I’d already basecoated these back in the day. Averland Sunset was the champ, coupled with some Balthasar Gold for the rings and an assortment of greens for the swirly stuff on the inside. I think I also used Agrax Earthshade to… shade them. All in all, it was about a 30-minute job of laying down the colours for these.
As you can see, they were rather uninspiring in terms of said swirly stuff, so I set about rectifying that.
The easiest way to do so was picking out some of the swirl crests inside the barrels with pure white, then glossing some contrast, speed, or simply watered down paint over it all. I wasn’t going to go through the trouble of working my way up from a darker to a brighter hue as I was aiming for visual impact and painting speed, rather than smooth transitions.
I chose a few ways to deal with the highlights, applying more or less white across the surface of the liquid as I saw fit, but generally doing up the main crests and some of the swirls around the sides, as well as the nose of the grubbin unlucky enough to be drowning in the barrel. There’s also supposed to be an eye-looking thing in there, left side, but I treated that mostly as a bubble, or something that would be fully caked in the liquid itself. I also picked out the nose/teeth of the poor sod jutting out of the middle of the barrels.
For the top coat job, I chose Familiar Pink (TAP Speedpaint), Hexwraith Flame (Citadel Contrast Paint), watered down TAP Toxic Mist, and watered down Vallejo Yellow Green.
The choices were great for the purposes of making these pop, and having four barrels containing four different colours of toxic goop just goes to show there’s a shit ton of stuff in the Nexus that can kill you, or worse, have you mutate.
The one caveat is the Familiar Pink, through which the white shows up a bit stark and firm, even for my tastes and plans, but I left it as-is and don’t really plan on doing anything further to blend it.
I am also not below stooping as low as possible in order to do up the undersides of the barrel which I’d left unpainted for some reason (laziness, probably). I give you, the gratuitous hazard penis, a Nexus staple since… today.
The barrel liquids and hands were finished with an Army Painter gloss varnish, while the sides and undersides were slapped with a matte one.
So there you have it: the Nexus barrels represent a fourth go of painting four obstacles (along with the dart columns, crates, and pillars). These things are all striking, big lumps of resin, along with pretty much every piece out there available for Nexus. They’re well worth painting and dropping onto your board for helot-kill-and-maiming purposes.
Or, you could just use the ones in your expansion box, which come prepainted.
But where’s the fun in that?
Thanks for reading, and have as nice a day as you deserve!
Cozzy