Acceptable Radiation: Ha-kell Yday, Spawn of Chaos

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Ha-kell Yday, Spawn of Chaos

"Many moons ago, there was a great warlord, Ha-kell Yday, who united the tribes. He was a strong and powerful fighter who vanquished all his foes. He also possessed a tongue of silver, winning many converts through his oratory. But he coveted more power. More power than any single god could give him. So Ha-kell hatched a plan. First, he sold his soul to the Taker of Skulls for battle prowess. Then, he again sold his soul to the Plague Bringer for the resilience to absorb an blow. After that, he sealed another pact for his soul to She Who Thirsts for the quickness of the snake. Ha-kell was greedy and again attempted to barter his soul to the Great Conspirator. But the Great Conspirator was not fooled and knew that Ha-kell was duplicitous. And he told his brothers of Ha-kell's ruse. Together, they cursed Ha-kell for his vanity and his lies. The Gods mutated his flesh, causing it stretch and rip as his body transformed into a monster. Bones sprung from his back and wings sprouted from his shoulders. And to mock his hunger for power, hungry maws sprouted from body. Maws that must feed constantly. Then the Gods banished Ha-kell to wander the nine realms for all of eternity."

-Campfire tale of the Tahmak Marauders

About a decade ago, I attended one of the Independent Grand Tournaments and faced off against a chaos army that included a converted Forgeworld Gigantic Chaos Spawn. That was the first time I had thought about actually converting one of those models. I thought the model was cool, but the Tyranid Scything Claws were a put-off as they seemed out of place. But replacing those with wings solves that problem. So all-in-all, it is a pretty simple conversion. But it's one that makes a huge difference.

Additionally, I built up the base with several broken columns from Scrbor and several clay bricks to simulate Ha-kell standing amidst a long broken and forgotten civilization.

When it came to painting, he was mostly painted with an airbrush. I began by painting the flesh areas with dwarf flesh and highlighting it by mixing in elf flesh. I then masked off the flesh areas as well as a little further up the body. The green areas were then airbrushed with Vallejo Sick Green and highlighted by mixing in Vallejo Dead Flesh. The wing membranes were airbrushed with Dead Flesh and then highlighted by mixing in white. Finally, I removed all the masking and painted the transition locations with a mix of sick green and dwarf flesh, with a few highlights created by mixing in Dead flesh.

After that, I pretty much applied all the washes to him, but not over the entire model. I made sure to apply them in splotches to give differing tones of the same color to simulate the change and freakish nature of a chaos spawn. After the washes, I applied some very thin layers of pure Dead flesh for the final highlights.

The rest of the bits were painted pretty much as you can see, teeth, horns, gums, tongues, etc. Nothing interesting there. Finally, I added some saliva with Uhu glue.

The gigantic spawn was the final piece in finishing my 2017 Armies on Parade entry, and I'm glad to have him done, but he was a lot of fun to paint. I've also entered him into Ex Profundis' Monster Competition, but after seeing some of the amazing entries for that, I'm so far out of my league!