Warhammer 40k: The Emperor's Children

Scroll down to see the process.

Insane colors, mismatch materials, and utter depravity make the Emperor's Children Legion a visual feast that can never be described as "too much". Once among the proudest and most refined of the Emperor's Legions, the phrase "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" doesn't even begin to cover the tragedy of Fulgrim's Legion. Ensnared early in the Heresy era, they were superseded by the Word Bearers alone in their fall to Chaos, beating even the Warmaster himself to the punch. And oh, how they did fall, so, so far, dragged into the depths of depravity by their own gene-father.

I looked at generations of miniatures going all the way back to the Rogue Trader era of the 1980's as well as the interpretations of other artists before me. I ended up with something recognizable that also felt unique to my tastes and style. Initially I started with more subdued colors and materials but felt they missed the mark of the book descriptions, so I scrapped that and started throwing colors and hues at the canvas at random, letting chaos guide my hand. I drew Fulgrim as a slight redesign of his current look based on his original model from the earliest days of the IP. I also included my own take on a Daemonette in the foreground, inspired by several different sources and my own ideas.

I knew going into this one that I wanted to capture the utter debauchery and excess championed by Slaanesh, the god of excess. The unquenchable thirst to reach new heights of sensation and experience, the loss of anything close to lucidity, and the unsettling visuals only beautiful to their corrupted eyes. It was most certainly a challenge that left plenty of sketches and ideas on the cutting room floor, but It was also the most fun I've had in a long time as an artist.

-Sam Bogits

Process

Initially I was experimenting with a landscape composition for this one, but after attempting some different compositions, I felt it was too spread out. I swapped to a vertical composition and ended up with a flow to the density that I liked a lot more. I then tightened the sketch based on several references.

Here I started with a basic two value under-painting for light and shadow to get a grip on the simple shapes and overlaid it with pink and green palette that shifted through yellow, purple, and orange. I created a brush that randomizes the hue with each brush stroke and put a grayscale layer on top of my colors. I then rendered a basic value painting under the grayscale layer with that brush so that I could simply focus on value and let the colors run wild underneath. When I turned the grayscale layer off, I was left with a chaotic mess of vibrant colors, seen here on the right most image.

I switched to a brush that still varied the hue but much less and began to render the scene in color, slowly reigning things in and defining subjects. I let the initial chaos guide my hand for materials and colors, ending up with leather padding; pink, purple, green, and black armor; shiny gold and chrome, and fleshy areas. Then it was simply a matter of putting in the hours.

Many, many hours later, I had finally rendered in all of my subjects and finalized their designs. In the middle image here I finished up Fulgrim and the rest of the background areas between my main subjects and added some fog to separate the layers of depth going from foreground to background. I then rebalanced the saturation and overall value distribution.

Lastly I spent another handful of hours simply chipping away at the details, refining all the surfaces and materials, adding spikes, melting faces, repainting areas that weren't cutting it for me, and layering in more texture. After this fine tooth comb treatment was complete, I was finally ready to sign my name and call this one finished.

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