Abaddon the Despoiler
The Warmaster of Chaos, architect of the black crusades, the newest piece to grace our display cabinet.
Abaddon was a truly fantastic model to paint, and casts an imposing shadow across any battlefield unlucky enough to feel his presence.
I’d been reading False Gods around the same time I was painting this, and decided to pay homage to the lodge symbols by adding a bunch of hidden (and not so hidden) symbols and scripts to the armour. The largest of these is a full ‘page’ of text almost completely hidden by the left pauldron, More visible are three columns of white text on the outside of the left leg, a visual that looked a lot more like the armour was manufactured by Nike than I would like, at least until I’d added in the gold trim.
I ummed and ahhed for a long time over a lot of the smaller details on this one trying to balance the colours. Obviously his armour had to be the black and gold with red accents that characterises the Black Legion, but elements like the talon of Horus, the demon sword Drach'nyen, the dead space marine on the base, and, notably, the cloak gave us more to think about.
I eventually settled on red for the talon, both because it fit in with the overall scheme and as a reference how Horus is painted in the classic Emperor vs Horus diorama by Mike McVey. If I was doing this again, I’d probably add some surface details to break up the red, but there’s enough detail on this figure that I’m happy with the end result nonetheless.
Drach'nyen needed to look as unnatural as possible, so contrasting red and blue seemed a nice way to go (and the end result was significantly less spider-man evoking than I’d feared!). I laid out the initial gradiants with an airbrush before edge-highlighting and fleshing out some details.
The default choice for the unlucky space marine beneath Abaddon’s spiked boot would of course be an Ultramarine, but I wanted to keep Abaddon’s face as the focal point so decided to for something lower-saturation and less contrasting. As a result, I ended up choosing a Black Templar instead. I tried for filigree patterns on the white of the pauldrons, but I suspect it doesn’t really come across as well as I would like and looks a bit more like unmotivated dirt. The same reasoning led to choosing white for the mk. X helmet skewered on the trophy rack.
The final and trickiest element to decide upon was the loincloth and cloak - I knew I wanted to do something a bit special for them as befits Abaddon’s status, and it had to be something a little bit unnerving and highly textured (in order to help differentiate it from the armour). In the end I realised the obvious choice - copying the twisted human forms and biomechanical detail that characterises the work of H. R. Geiger.
The cloak and loincloth are each decorated with a single custom-printed waterslide transfer (plus several painstaking hours of microsol and cotton swabs to get them to adhere correctly to the uneven surfaces), with shading and highlighting applied over the top. All in all a deeply satisfying process!
