Chaos Space Marine Forgefiend [Black Legion]

Being the biggest miniature I have painted to date, the Chaos Space Marine Forgefiend offered a new kind of challenge to me. While the Forgefiend in Black Legion colours wasn't too difficult to paint, it did have a lot of small details for such a big miniature which translated into many hours of paint time. I also decided to paint up both the head choices that came in the box as well as all the weapons i.e. the Hades autocannons and ectoplasma cannons, so that added to the time spent on this miniature. Of all the possible configurations, I think the three ectoplasma cannons one looked the coolest.

Chaos Space Marine Forgefiend with three ectoplasma cannons

In terms of lighting effects, I painted a very simple object source lighting (OSL) on the skulls of the ectoplasma cannon as well as flames on the skull furnaces located next to the exhaust pipes. The vents on the front torso were also painted in a similar manner as the ectoplasma cannons.

Some OSL effects on the ectoplasma cannon

Skull furnace was redone by adding a touch of white in the flames for contrast

Having all three ectoplasma cannons attached to the Forgefiend made it look more chaos-like. Additionally, this configuration had a better balance of organic and mechanical components.

Say aah ...

From this angle, the head looks almost bird-like

Meanwhile, the other Forgefiend configuration comprised the "Dinobot" head and two Hades autocannons a.k.a. the "Transformer" mode. To be fair, it does look cool but just not very chaos-like.

More than meets the eye ...

... robots in disguise

Front torso has similar lighting effects to the ectoplasma cannons

Even the back of the Forgefiend had a lot of details to paint

So my Chaos army finally has heavy support. There is still the Land Raider, Defiler and Heldrake in cold storage but if I were to paint all that and field them in battle ... it would be just too cheesy, wouldn't it? Anyway, have a good 4th of July to those who are celebrating it. Cheers!