How to paint Sautekh dynasty Necrons that look like ancient and menacing fallen royalty.

1. OPTIONAL: Establish a light profile. This is where you choose parts of the model to give artificial lighting and make a bit brighter than the rest of the model. Put your model under a lamp at whatever angle you think looks best and see where most of the light hits. When you paint, take some extra care to drybrush the brighter metallics a bit more intensely in these areas, and don't let wash pool up at all here. In the example picture, I turned the contrast way up, and you can see that most of the light falls on the right side of the face + right hand/forearm + right side of the leg as well as a little less intensely on the upper right torso + the inner left arm. You can also apply this same method for OSL by painting brighter layers on the surfaces close to glowing objects.
2. Prime black.
3. Basecoat with Iron Warriors .
4. Apply Runelord Brass to the regal elements, sigil, etc.
5. Apply Warplock Bronze to the joints and inner skeletal parts. I prefer to thin this down quite a bit and let it "stain" the joints rather than fully coat them.
6. Hit the whole model with a wash of Agrax Earthshade thinned 50/50. Try to drag it out of the joints and onto the armor plates.
7. Using Leadbelcher , drybrush the armor.
8. Dab patches of Typhus Corrosion into the joints. For more buildup you can let it dry and then apply more. Then lightly drybrush Ryza Rust over those same areas.
9. Finally, take Rust , wipe most of it off your brush, and glaze it over the typhus/ryza buildup.
10. All over Nuln Oil wash.
11. Edge highlight the armor with Stormhost Silver , the joints with Warplock Bronze , the regal elements with Sycorax Bronze , and the gun/black parts with Eshin Grey .
12. Using Canoptek Alloy , lightly drybrush the high/bright/focused parts of the model.
13. Paint the weapons and cables with Abaddon Black .
14. Glaze Caliban Green over the cables.
15. Glaze Warpstone Glow over the cables, aiming to create a gradient that is brightest towards the center of the cable and dark towards the ends.
16. For any glowing objects, start by basing in white. Be prepared to water this down pretty heavily and paint several layers over the object.
17. Cover the white in Warp Lightning .
18. Drybrush the object with white, and catch the nearest surfaces and edges too.
19. Do another pass around the white with an even lighter drybrush of white or offwhite.
20. Coat the object with Tesseract Glow .
21. On the further away white/offwhite, take most of the tesseract glow off your brush and build the glow up slowly.
22. Add white as a highlight. For orbs, it should be a dot. For blades, it should be an edge highlight. For longer objects (i.e the deathmark's weapon), it should be a line.
23. For objects that are further away that may still reflect some of the glow, just glaze tesseract over it.
24. Don't go overboard! Most of the time the glow should be subtle and the white shouldn't be drybrushed heavily enough to fully cover the surface. Save the intense glows for large objects like the overlord's blade.