How to Paint Necromunda Hired Guns and Bounty Hunters

Every other entry in this section is a gang. This one is not. Bounty hunters, hangers-on, brutes, exotic beasts, hive scum, dramatis personae and Merchant Guild delegations belong to no House - the rules sell them as models any gang may hire, and Games Workshop's own copy is explicit that the ex-Orlock and ex-Goliath hunters left their House allegiances behind them.

So there is no gang colour to get right, and no batch to keep consistent. What you have instead is a shelf of one-off characters, bought a model or two at a time, and a different painting problem: how do you make forty unrelated individuals look like they inhabit the same world?

The answer is not a shared colour. It is a shared texture.

The signature look

Scavenged. Everything a hired gun wears was taken from somewhere else and has been repaired at least once: a weathered olive-drab coat over mismatched armour plates, webbing and kit-bags in three different browns, a weapon better maintained than anything a ganger carries, and dust from the boots to the knee. The olive drab is the closest thing this heading has to a colour, and it is a default rather than a rule - a coat, a bedroll, a satchel, a scrap of tarpaulin.

Where a gang reads as a uniform, these should read as a profession. The gear is good. The clothes are whatever was to hand.

The three rules that hold them together

Follow these and every character can have a completely different palette without the collection falling apart.

1. One basing recipe, applied identically to every model. This does more work than anything else on the page. Grey plascrete, the same grit, the same rust spill, the same rim colour. Necromunda happens indoors; see basing miniatures.
2. One grime recipe. Whatever you use for dust and wear - a stipple of Typhus Corrosion and a scrubbed-back drybrush of Ryza Rust, dust drybrushed up from the base in Karak Stone - use exactly the same one on every figure. Shared dirt reads as a shared place.
3. One value discipline. Keep every character mid-to-dark with a single bright note. A hired gun in three saturated colours looks like a fantasy adventurer; a hired gun in five browns with one red rag looks like he lives here.

The scavenged coat: the drab core

The recipe most of these models want somewhere on them.

1. Undercoat grey or black, then basecoat Death Korps Drab, two thin coats.
2. Shade with Agrax Earthshade across the whole garment. Athonian Camoshade instead if you want the drab greener and colder.
3. Layer Baneblade Brown on the raised folds, keeping it off the deep creases.
4. Highlight Karak Stone on the top edge of each fold, the shoulders and the leading edge of the coat.
5. Stipple a very little Screaming Skull onto the elbows, cuffs and the seat of the coat - the places cloth goes pale before it wears through.

Vallejo painters can run US Olive Drab into Khaki; Army Painter Fanatic runs Olive Drab into Desert Yellow. Either sits in the same family.

The fast route: undercoat Wraithbone, one coat of Militarum Green or Creed Camo contrast, then re-highlight the top of each fold with Karak Stone. On a heavily draped model the contrast pools exactly where you would have shaded.

Leather, webbing and kit

Half of every hired gun is straps. Vary the browns deliberately - a leather coat, a canvas satchel and a webbing belt should not be the same colour, because nothing on the model was bought together.

• Dark leather: Rhinox Hide, shade Agrax Earthshade, layer Mournfang Brown, edge Skrag Brown on the strap edges and buckle surrounds.
• Canvas and rope: Zandri Dust, shade Agrax Earthshade, layer Karak Stone, highlight Screaming Skull on the weave.
• Worn tan gear: Gorthor Brown into Baneblade Brown - useful for a third brown that reads as neither leather nor canvas.

Contrast routes over Wraithbone: Snakebite Leather for tan, Wyldwood for dark leather, Skeleton Horde for canvas and rope. Three different pots over one undercoat is the whole variety problem solved in an evening.

Weapons: better kept than the gang's

This is the detail that sells the profession. A ganger's gun is battered; a bounty hunter's is maintained.

1. Leadbelcher basecoat.
2. Nuln Oil, into the recesses rather than slopped over the whole barrel.
3. Layer Ironbreaker on the body of the weapon.
4. Edge Runefang Steel on the barrel lip, the sights, the ejection port and the blade edges.
5. Stop there. No corrosion on the working parts - keep Typhus Corrosion for the armour plates, the kit and the boots.

Brass and bronze fittings, of which there are many: Warplock Bronze, shade Agrax Earthshade, edge Sycorax Bronze. For anything that should look valuable rather than industrial - a Guild delegate's chain of office, a trophy - Balthasar Gold into Runelord Brass.

Skin, and the several kinds of it

This heading has more non-human models than any other in the game, which is a gift when you are trying to make individuals.

• Living human - Doombull Brown, then Cadian Fleshtone, shade Reikland Fleshshade, highlight Kislev Flesh. Contrast route: Guilliman Flesh or Fyreslayer Flesh over Wraithbone.
• Underhive pale - Rakarth Flesh, shade Druchii Violet rather than a brown, layer Pallid Wych Flesh, touch Screaming Skull on the brow and knuckles. Use this for anyone who has not seen a sunlamp: whisper merchants, hereteks, cadaver merchants.
• Servitor and ogryn flesh - the same pale ramp, but shade with Agrax Earthshade for grime and glaze Wazdakka Red thinly into the sockets around the implants. Servitor flesh should look preserved, not healthy.
• Beastman fur and hide - Stormvermin Fur basecoat, Agrax Earthshade, drybrush Karak Stone with the direction of the hair. Horns and hooves: Zandri Dust, shade, then Screaming Skull at the tips.
• Squat and Ratling - the human ramp, but paint the beard as the focal point. Mournfang Brown into Skrag Brown for red, or Eshin Grey into Longbeard Grey for iron-grey.
• Machines - the excavation automata and the industrial servitor rigs are plate, not people. Leadbelcher and Warplock Bronze with heavy Typhus Corrosion and Ryza Rust around every joint, and one Tesseract Glow or Wazdakka Red optic so the thing reads as switched on.

Give each one a single bright note

The trick that makes a shelf of drab characters look deliberate rather than muddy: one saturated colour per model, and a different one each time. Keep it to a small area - a rag, a hood lining, a holster, a bedroll, a length of hazard tape, a lens.

Wild Rider Red on one. Baharroth Blue on the next. Moot Green, Jokaero Orange, Xereus Purple, Flash Gitz Yellow - work down the list and do not repeat until you have to. The bright note is also where you place the eye, so put it near the head or the weapon hand.

Psychic and wyrd characters get theirs as a glow instead: Kantor Blue at the base of the effect, Calgar Blue through the middle, Baharroth Blue near the edge, and a thin White Scar line at the very edge, with a faint glaze of the same blue onto whatever the glow sits against. Tesseract Glow does the one-coat version on small optics and vials.

Quick-quality: one character in an evening

These arrive one or two at a time, which means you can finish each one properly and still keep pace with your gang.

1. Undercoat Wraithbone.
2. Block the whole model in contrast: Militarum Green coat, Wyldwood leather, Skeleton Horde canvas, Basilicanum Grey or Black Templar on the armour plates, Guilliman Flesh on the skin.
3. Metals over the top - Leadbelcher and Nuln Oil - because contrast paints do not do metal.
4. Re-highlight only three places: the top edge of the coat's folds, the weapon edges, and the face.
5. Grime and base to the shared recipe.
6. The bright note, last, so you can see where the model needs it.

An hour or two, and it stands next to a fully layered gang without looking rushed - because on a single character the eye goes to the face and the gun, and you painted both of those properly.

Tips and common mistakes

• Do not give them gang colours. A bounty hunter painted in Escher green stops being a hired gun and becomes an Escher model. If you want one to look like he currently works for your gang, put the gang colour on the rag or the armband only.
• Vary the browns on purpose. The commonest failure here is painting every strap, satchel and boot in one brown and washing the lot. It reads as a single leather boilersuit.
• Weather from the ground up. Boots and shins filthy, chest and shoulders clean. Even grime everywhere looks like a mistake.
• Keep the weapons clean. It is one of the two things that says "professional" rather than "ganger". The other is that the model is standing still.
• Resist a second bright colour. One note per model. The variety comes from the collection, not from each figure.
• Paint them one at a time. There is no batch here and no reason to invent one. This is the section of the game where you get to slow down.

These are our editorial recipes rather than an official scheme - there is no studio palette for a heading whose whole premise is that nobody owns it. Browse every kit in the range, the rest of the underhive in the Necromunda paint list, and when your drab is where you want it, open the scheme in the generator to swap brands or push the coat greener.