How to Paint Necromunda

A Necromunda gang is six to twelve fighters, which changes the painting job completely. You are not looking for a scheme you can repeat forty times without losing your mind — you are painting a small cast of individuals who will pick up injuries, names and reputations over a campaign, and each one can afford the attention you would only give a 40,000 character.

That scale is why slapchop and contrast paints suit the underhive so well: a zenithal drybrushed underlayer glazed over with a couple of colours gets a whole gang table-ready in an evening, and the grime and shadow the method leaves behind is exactly the look. Where a Space Marine wants clean armour panels, an underhive gang wants dirt in the recesses, rust on the metal and boots that have been somewhere unpleasant.

Gang colours are also yours to choose in a way faction colours are not. The Houses have signature palettes - Escher acid brights, Goliath flesh and orange, Van Saar clean techno-blue, Delaque black and pallor, Orlock workwear, Cawdor rags and flame - but a gang is a family within a House, and swapping the accent colour is the normal thing to do rather than a conversion. Each guide gives the House palette and the order to paint it in; the generator shifts it to whatever your gang wears.