A gibbering Chaos Abomination storms out of the ruins

Diehard Miniatures finished another awesome Kickstarter earlier this year and (even though I should finish painting what I already have ;) I couldn't resist. One of the models I chose from the offerings was this Chaos Abomination (Abaddon the Unchained). The picture looked freaky, which turend out to be a very apt description of the model in real life, if you aske me. With my mind boggling over the details I just had to paint him. Here's the result.

The road to power leads to either of two fates: "the triumphant shriek, voiced from the throat of a newly -birthed Daemon; or the gibbering of a once-man, a Chaos Spawn, wallowing in the stench of its own failure."

Now there's a Chaos Spawn Abomination you'll be wanting to run from (at high speed)! Painting the model was a bit akin to playing one too many games of Arkham Horror: too many mouths in the wrong place if you ask me. In other words: very appropriate nightmare fuel for any Chaos warband or 'Do not go near the castle'-style castle. 

I have so many comments to make here, I shall refrain from all of them to show I have restraint (or at least fake it)...

Between all the eyes there's the particular face above here, crazy stuff. I decided to use this model with a lot of skin to practice new skin tone techniques. I initially blasted the (zentihal primed) model with Vallejo Model Air Tan Earth, following up with a nadiral (I suppose its called) blast of Hull Red (nadiral as in shooting from underneath to hit the shadows). I then zenithaled another blast of slightly lightened Tan Earth to lay in more highlights. From that point I switched to the brush, mixing thinned purple and pink paint with Tan Earth to further exaggerate the shadows. I then mixed in Vallejo Game Color Pale Flesh to get more highlights. When all the paint dried I applied Reikland Flesh Shade to select areas to tie the colors together. As a whole the skin turned out a bit darker than planned, but I like it. It has a lot of contrast.

People worrying about 'shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming' have obviously never met this solidly shaped eye-filled nightmare.

With the flesh tones in place I wondered about all the tentacles and pustules on the skin. Painting these a different color (for some odd reason I have the tendency to opt for green with tentacles) would destroy all my carefully applied skin tones. In the end I decided to go for glazes, using some of the last (precious and discontinued) Lamenters Yellow and Bloodletter glazes to build up color. I did add opaque paints to the many (many, many) mouths using Screamer Pink to get a bit of definition in the gums and Rakart Flesh (lightened with Dead White) to lay in the teeth. 

Now all that's left is finding a gaming table to slap this monster down on. He's awesome (in my very humble opinion).

Last, but not least where the eyeballs. I have always taken notion of the advice not to paint eyes white. I have never actually followed this advice. As some of these eyeballs are quite big (and I had a bit on the wet palette) I decided to mix some pink with the white for the eyeballs. The 'shoulder mounted' eyeball was big enough to actually paint an iris in too. I finished up by opening the Bloodletter glaze again, adding a few red lines in the eyeballs. After that I quickly added a bit of basing (green to contrast with all the red tones). I really (publicly) should make a note to myself here to switch basing up a bit and do something original on a next project. With that in mind, I still have two Twisted Sisters, a bad-ass die hard Dwarf, a very special Orc and three huge robots to paint. Plenty of chance to get creative there.