Hello to all,

With Zhufor almost finished I have decided to start work on Abaddon the Despoiler. I have always liked this model and have wanted to paint him for a long time.

Games Workshop have produced a new range called finecast, it has been marketed as being the finest quality. With the launch of Finecast, they will be phasing out all of their old metal models which is a shame. The following is from their website:

"Our Citadel Finecast models are the latest step in hobby evolution, providing you with incredibly detailed, high-quality resin kits to bolster your army."

The price I paid for Abaddon was 14.50GBP and I was a bit disapointed with the quality of the model especially as I remember that the metal version of Abaddon was better quality.

It arrived with loads of flash and warpage. There was also lots of detail damaged due to poor casting, air bubbles were plenty. I had a lot of trimming to get all the parts to fit as well.


His left hand was badly cast and missing in detail because of an air pocket.

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?prodId=prod1160030a

Biggest changes I have made is the removal of the trophy rack and his topknot of hair. I like my bad guys to be bald and I am not a fan of trophy racks.





Next step is to undercoat him and start painting. Armour will be black with gold trim.

Hopefully I will do a good job with him, I was just a bit annoyed with the quality for a product with is meant to be top of the range. As Finecast is new, I am hoping that the quality issues will be resolved and that current poor casting is due to teething problems caused by the launch of a new product.

I hope quality will improve and that the finecast idea is simply not an excuse for cost reduction by replacing white metal with resin.

Any thoughts or opinions with finecast I would be interested to know.

Regards,

Jamie

Have continued to prep the figure for painting, noticed that as well as his left hand being damaged, a finger was completely missing due to casting.



To fix this, I had to crack open the green modelling putty and try and fill in the missing detail. This was my first attempt at fixing a model using putty, so although low key I was happy with the end result.









I'll wait for the putty to dry before moving basecoating the figure.

Jamie

Hello to all,

I'm currently juggling between the two build logs which is good as Zhufor is almost finished. I hope to finish Abaddon a bit quicker than Zhufor this time around as well. Anyway to work.



So far have only undercoated the figure using charadon grey. The first area I will paint will be the gold trim, all I have done today is get the basecoat of 50/50 scorched brown and shining gold. The next step will be to get the main coat of shining gold on with 2-3 thin coats. Once this is done I can start washing using the same method for Zhufor.



I will aim to show the technique I used stage by stage using a close up of the right shoulder guard. Here is the first step, not much to see apart from the basecoat. At this point I am not aiming to be neat, the armour will be black and I can go back and tidy up the armour once it has been finished.



Regards to all,

Jamie

Hello,

All I have managed tonight is the basecoating of the armour trim with a couple coats of shining gold. Once this was dry, I gave the entire model a heavy wash of thraka green. I'll have to leave it there tonight. Will need to let the wash dry in before moving on to highlighting.









Having painted the undercoat, the repair on his left hand is less noticable. I am happy with the result, below is a few close ups of the hand:





Until tomorrow....

Regards,

Jamie

Hello to all,

Today I have highlighted the armour trim with a rough 50/50 mix of shining gold and mithril silver. Will hopefully get started on the armour later once I have given the armour a wash of devlan mud to tone it down.





Cheers,

Jamie

Hello,

I have given the gold a wash with devlan mud and left it to dry. With this done the next step is to paint the armour black, I will do this in sections starting with the right shoulder guard.





When I painted the armour black, I gave this section of gold trim another highlight of 50/50 silver and gold. Also I plan on painting the eye of horus symbol red. Will complete this tomorrow, all I have done is get the basecoat of red gore on the eye itself.



Paining each armour plate will be the time consuming part as I will have to be carefull when filling in the detail with black. Hopefully if I take my time I can avoid making any mistakes.

Cheers

Jamie

Hello to all,

As I could not get much done with Zhufor tonight, I spent most of my available time working on abaddon. I have managed to paint the armour black, finish the gold trim, start work on the the detailing and have almost finished the face. As such there are a lot of photos so I will break it down into separate posts for each part. We will begin with the armour:







Using a fine detail brush I painted each armour panel with a thin coat of chaos black. Once this was done, I went over the gold trim with a final highlight of 50/50 shining gold and mithril silver. The was drybrushed on using a fine detail brush. Some close ups are shown below:





The eye of horus above was blacklined, this was to cover up a mistake I had made. I will finish the eye at a later stage. The next part is the beginning of the fine details.

cheers

Jamie

The next stage was to paint the exposed tubes on Abaddon's chest as well as the pistons and leg joints on his armour.
This was simply done by applying mithril silver. Before weathering the silver paint to make it less shiny and new, I decided
to start on his face





The face was painted in three steps:


The first step was to get a couple of thin coats of snakebite leather to act as a base coat.


To achieve the pale skin colour, I used kommando Khaki and painted it on all the raised features of the face.


Finally I mixed in a bit of white to the skin tone and highlighted the extreme edges of detail such as the brow and nose.

With the face completed, I gave the mithril silver a wash with devlan mud to take away the sheen. I also washed the eye sockets to
give an unhealthy pallid look to his face.

Here is a picture of the model at the end of today:



And a close up of the face and chest tubing with the wash:



Tomorrow I hope to get most of the detailing finished (skulls on his armour, his belt etc) before moving onto the sword and power claw.

Kind Regards,

Jamie

Hello to all,

Today I have almost finished the model. It has been a lovely day here in Portsmouth so I took advantage of the weather and painted outside. I started with by painting the belt red gore correcting any mistakes made to the gold detailing on the belt. All the skulls were painted skull white, the cloth tabard was given a few coats of kommando khaki and the wires and chains were painted boltgun metal and mithril silver. Finally the eyes were painted with skull white and the sockets darkened with scorched brown.

With this all done I painted the combi-bolter on the power claw boltgun metal. After this I gave the figure a heavy wash of devlan mud to tone everything done. When this was done, a red wash was applied to the cloth tabbard, the belt and the eyes.








The sword and the power claw blades were painted mithril silver and then washed with devlan mud. After this I gave the tips of the claw blades and the tip of the sword a wash with asurmen blue. The base of the blades and sword were washed with red and I used a mixture of red, blue, brown and green washes for in between. This was done experimental until I was happy with the result.





All that needs to be done now is to maybe give the black armour a highlight on areas like the sword arm and make a start on the base.

Kind regards,

Jamie

Great idea getting rid of the hair braid and trophy racks!
It looks Wicked

Yeah I'm glad I got rid of all that junk, it looks a bit crowded with all the skulls n spikes. Add the hair and I don't know how the bit between the trophy racks would be painted. He looks a lot nastier as a baldy!

I hope to get started on the base tonight so hopefully I will be finished by the end of the week.

Cheers

Jamie

Evening all,

Have made a start on the base, added a space marine beakie helmet at the front from the basing kit and covered the rest in small gravel.

I will leave it overnight to settle before painting.





Regards,

Jamie

Hello,

Well that is Abaddon finished, only the varnishing left to do. The base was painted grey and drybrushed with bleached bone. The helmet was painted with red gore and the eye lens finished with ultramarine blue.

Finally a wash of devlan mud was applied to the whole base.







With Abaddon finished, I think I will move onto something new, I am thinking of painting some 1/35 armour and figures as well as continuing with 40k. At the moment by biggest weakpoint is armour and painting camo on figures. I would like to try and improve these areas.

Hope anyone reading likes the pictures!

Regards,

Jamie