Heretic Cursed Armor – Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade Fan Art

The final piece in the series of concept fan art inspired by a video game a few years ago

Followers,

This is exciting news for me. I am finally able to present the final piece of fan art from the series of work inspired by Warhammer 40,000 and the video game Eternal Crusade.

When I first heard about that game years ago, I was eager to lose myself in a new online WH40K experience. While we all know how that turned out, it also sparked my imagination to begin work on these concept fan art pieces.

Like I mentioned before, I was and always will be a follower of Chaos. Thus, the dark leanings of the theme of these.

This final piece is a staple of the followers of the Ruinous Powers – cursed armor of the heretic denomination. This design has the trappings of followers of the Word Bearers Chaos Space Marine legion. Etchings on the surface meant to pierce the veil, skin of their enemies to fuel the warp entities thirst, and the typical festooning of chains, spikes, and unsettling visages that often go along with the followers of chaos.

Again, I am trying to push my abilities with doing these online on my machine. This time, I tried another method I have not tried yet. This time, using my Wacom pen and tablet and photoshop, I first began by blocking in color fields. Once done with that, I moved on to add a layer of lighting and shadows as I would have before doing the color in the process I first used. In fact, this is the process I used in the physical world when I used to work with acrylics on canvas and always enjoyed the results.

Now, I am not what I might call a colorist, so the shading is one in different tints and shades of semitransparent white, grays, and black.

I purposely did not spend an inordinate amount of time on completing this one, as I wanted to challenge myself to see what I could get done. Overall, again, happy with what it looks like considering.

 
Backstory
The Astra Militarum of the local region had a story they used to tell. It involved the seemingly impenetrable armor of the heretic space marines that had often plagued them through the sector. These were led by an unnamed behemoth of a warlord, terrible to behold and even worse to listen to. It seemed reality would shift as he would begin spewing his litany of demonic gibbering. None in the crawler had been there, but their fathers and grandfathers had been. Ilteo had heard the armor was cast from the molten core of warp and super cooled by the deep freeze of the void as it sought its new owners. Mathis said his father had seen the leader of the red warband strip the flesh from the body of a living soldier on the battlefield only to drape it across his cuirass like a bedsheet. The colonel in the crawler laughed. He shared a factual account, so he would swear, of his great grandfather witnessing a strange ceremony enacted upon the chaos warlord. The story goes that as a great battle began upon one of the outworld defense moons, while the fog of war was settling in, a glimpse was caught of two wretched creatures reciting what could only be called inane rambling that had been scrawled on the surface the armor. As it was done, the glyphs began to glow. He shared how the air seemed to become super charged – he recounted the seriousness with which his great grandfather would describe the hair on his neck and arms stand up and that he could taste ozone. The colonel was a great storyteller. The younger ones in the crawler were transfixed. He knew he had them hooked. He would go on to say that that he was suddenly soaked in the small of his back with sweat. He jumped as he was surprised by the explosion of thunder nearby. At this point, the chaos warlord was glowing an unnatural red. He could feel something was off. As if at the snap of a finger, a blink of his eyes brought a complete change of the fabric of reality. Everything was in slow motion, color had escaped from his vision, and there were now the silhouettes of hundreds of unknown creatures on either of or behind the Chaos leader. They all sat oddly still, poised and ready to strike. At the question of what happened, the colonel paused. A smirk prefaced his explanation. He told them how that flavor of heretic astartes held great and terrible powers through the connection to the warp. They would come to battle and recite the scrawling they carried, each meant to weaken the fabric of reality in order to allow the Ruinous Powers to lend them aid as a reward for their faith. At that time, it was a particularly large-scale battle and this Warlord had been in high regard. When they asked how his great grandfather got away, he would clam up though as his shame was obvious. The colonel would say he was a coward and ran and escaped by accident with his life. As he ran, a bolt of warp energy flipped a transport over a crater he had been running through and he hid there until the fight had moved past. He eventually was picked up by rescue lifters and taken back to their rendezvous in orbit. There he was interrogated by Imperial Agents for details and sent back home – an early retirement. The crawler fell silent as it trundled to the front-line fire-base of the engagement. The colonel peaked through the view-port and paused in horror. He didn’t have the heart to tell the crew what he saw.
 
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