In Progress: Necron Flayed Ones

I've set out to make some of my own Flayed Ones. Here's the process I went through.

I've never been a big fan of the Necron Flayed One models. They're fine, but somehow too clean, not scary enough, and a bit pricey for five finecast models.

Games Workshop Flayed Ones Models

This never used to be a problem, because Flayed Ones were never that good. Come 8th edition, and now they're good. That alone isn't always enough for me to add a unit to my lists. I've managed to avoid both Space Marine Scouts and Bikes. They've been good for years, but I don't like them. The only faction that makes sense going to war on giant motorcycles is Orks, and only because not making sense is kind of their thing.

I decided to take a shot at making my own. I have a lot of Necron bits, and I found that I could take legs from the Doomsday/Ghost Ark kit (which has Necron Warrior bits left over if you go Doomsday Ark), and arms from the many leftovers I had, probably from Immortal kits. I then ordered some new torsos and Ad Mech bits for the some of the claws, filling the rest out from other Necron bits like blades and spiky things from the Immortal and Wraith kits.

I was really happy with this initial result, so I moved on to others, experimenting with posing and different hand weapons.

It's easy to cut up and re-pose Necrons for the most part, but I did get some bad joins in places. The nice thing is that Flayed Ones need to be covered in the skins of their victims, and that's a great way to hide clumsy kit-bashing.

Doing that above was actually pretty fast and easy. I flattened out some green stuff, initially by placing it between two sheets of cling wrap and rolling it with a rolling pin, using Vaseline to keep it from getting sticky. I found quickly that I could just flatten it with my finger. I then cut off strips and squares and draped them over the model, then used a hooked sculpting tool to pull at the skin to get it tight to the body and give it a torn look.

I found this technique on Instagram (a quick search of #flayedones will pull those originals up, which use different conversion parts and so look different, and very cool).

As a side note, Vaseline is amazing to use with green stuff. It allows you to smooth out fingerprints and work in the medium with zero stickiness. Of course, now I have to wash these things.