Heresy & Heroes

Aspiring Champion of the Emperor’s Children Chaos Space Marines

It dawned on me that I don’t have any pictures of my recently completed Emperor’s Chidlren Aspiring Champion on this blog, and this post is here to rectify that. I painted him a couple of months ago for the Brotherhood of the Brush painting tournament that is run by Warhammer World on Facebook (up next is the new plastic Nurgle Herald) and I was pretty happy with my completed model.

It’s another great GW sculpt. Whenever I see a model like this, I think back to the awkward static poses of old (that made the model look like he was showing you some guns in his gun showroom) and rejoice in how far we have come since then. There’s a lot of energy in the pose and it really captures the essence of this barely sensible psychopath charging towards the enemy in a blood-lust induced rage (or in the case of a Slaanesh worshiper like this guy, just a lust induced rage).

If you’re painting a 40k Emperor’s Children force, it’s a case of ‘go gaudy, or go home’ so I opted for the eye-bleeding neon pink (achieved by painting Citadel’s Emperor’s Children Pink over a base of Pink Horror). But I also wanted to incorporate some different (yet still vulgar hues). There’s some electric blue, neon green and even some animal print too (dude caught a Space Cheetah somewhere). And lots of moody gold. Far from the regal purple of 30k, 40k Emperor’s Children should be a representation of mad artists and creative psychopaths who want to hurts your eyes, ears and everything else too.

There are so many great details all over this model that were really fun to paint and play with, so here are a few close-ups…

I went for weathered bronze on the knife, in part because it’s one of the few techniques that I’m actually quite good at, but also because it separated it from all that gold. This was my first chance to use the new technical paints and this knife incorporated Nihlakh Oxide which is really fun to work with.

The twisted, evil face on the axe also deserved something different, so I went with clean, warm bone and a grim, red eye.

I love the fact that you now get these scenic stands with the plastic models and though I’ve never painted any Necrons before, I really enjoyed weathering this one with the now well covered (on this blog and everywhere else) combo of Typhus Corrosion and Ryza Rust on Leadbelcher.

The backpack was a hidden joy to this piece. The combi-melta, the classic Chaos look and the embedded Inquisitor’s head were really fun to paint. And I got to use Blood For The Blood God to paint trails coming out of the Inquisitor’s Eyes. Grimdark indeed.

This was painted using all Citadel Paints over a black undercoat, and a Windsor & Newton Series 7 Sable 000 was used throughout.