Spring Cleaning - A-bad'un the Bit-smaller
A base fit for a Badass
Games workshop have come a long way with their thematic bases and even their base sizes, "back in teh day we ad lil bases, an we made do! not like you young'uns with your 35 and 40mm base options and moulded details! we had to make our own rocks!" The original base for Abaddon was tiny, it barely kept him standing, this of course would not do for a chaos lord, let alone the great despoiler.
I wanted a base that was functional but also had a little story, so i opted for a 40mm base with a broken imperial eagle, after taking the time to bend Abaddons leg he needed something suitable to stand on after all. The base itself was a simple cylinder in Bender with a 3mm thickness, 40mm diameter and the top face of the cylinder resized to 38mm to give the bevelled edge. The imperial eagle was taken from thingiverse and then resized and modified in blender. 
the base components after printing, i decided to print the sections off as separate pieces to give me the freedom of placing the body and wings in the best position.
a simple covering of PVA glue and sand always gives a nice base texture but if you want something to look more like sand itself then i recommend using super glue and baking soda which gives a decent gritty texture. 
Also if you ever need a good substitute for big rocks then look no further than a bag of cheap cat litter, just make sure the cat hasn't used it first.
I applied the stones in a fairly uniform pattern, i wanted to give the impression that the eagle was maybe positioned on a wall which has long since collapsed and toppled on top of the fallen icon.
Gave the base a very basic undercoat of black followed by an earthy brown for the soil, blighted gold (P3) for the eagle and a dark grey for the stones.
i applied some aggrellan earth technical pain to the base and gave it a few hours to dry, then went back and washed the whole base in agrax earthshade wash.
Finally drybrushed the whole base with a light cream such as terminatus stone, added some nihilakh oxide to the recesses of the eagles wings before brightening up the raised areas with retributior gold.
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