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Description

So I decided to have a bit of a play with the Warhammer 40k gods of Chaos, with the aim of making them seem appealing (from the PoV of cults) in a slightly folksy way and also sympathetic. These are all watercolour and fineliner, are about 7" by 10" (TINY!) and were done at speed while going "AHHHHHHHHHHHHH".

I've included my design notes here:

Slaanesh: I wanted to do something very different for Slaanesh, instead of the usual fetish fuel stuff. So here we have the androgynous, doll-like and somewhat inhuman Slaanesh. A blank slate, a nothingness of form and person-hood onto which the onlooker can project their desires. A blank eyeless mask on top of a concealed form.
Eyes because it felt right to include some aspect of voyeurism

Tzeentch. So here I riffed a bit off hell boy and sacred hearts for the crown. Other than that I decided that clearly Tzeentch needed to be a corvid, little birdy hands entangled in a cats cradle, forked tongue to evoke some untrustworthy serpent imagery.
Riffing heavily off that murderboard meme, psychedelia, and very much trying to evoke the look of someone way down a conspiracy thread
Also I painted this having gone to bed at about 4.30am. I felt this was on brand for painting Tzeentch

Khorne: So khorne was an utter pain to do. In contrast to Slaanesh it is cluttered (Slaanesh was very deliberate quite minimalist). Khorne needs to be cluttered. Violence is messy. The hounds of khorne (lipless, horrible things) also made an appearance.
So the important thing here is Khorne is female. Notably Khorne here is not the stereotypical muscular warrior woman, she is slight to the point of frailty, breaking free of some bonds and still trapped by others, bloodied from fighting (her blood and the blood of others). Trying really to go for the anger against injustice, oppression, of fighting without power or necessarily hope, of pure anger. I wanted this to not be sexualised in the typical manner of female anger and violence.
A lot of what I am trying to do with these is to make the iconography make sense as something people would want instead of the Imperium, for it to be sympathetic and for the fall to chaos to be understandable.

Nurgle: Nurgle was tricky. My original plan was a skeleton surrounded by a swarm of locusts, but that didn't quite work as an idea.
My main concerns with Nurgle was that I did not want the portrayal to be a grotesque of any sort, as well as avoiding deformities and anything where the descriptor "corpulent" would be used.
So here we have an earthy, grandmotherly Nurgle, the carer and protector, yet still of decay and death (hence worms, moss, rats and a vulture). No halo, party because I forgot, partly because it just doesn't fit the aesthetic. Nurgle is gentle, kind and down to earth

There are significant numbers of things in all of these pictures. Easter eggs for the observant

Description

So I decided to have a bit of a play with the Warhammer 40k gods of Chaos, with the aim of making them seem appealing (from the PoV of cults) in a slightly folksy way and also sympathetic. These are all watercolour and fineliner, are about 7" by 10" (TINY!) and were done at speed while going "AHHHHHHHHHHHHH".

I've included my design notes here:

Slaanesh: I wanted to do something very different for Slaanesh, instead of the usual fetish fuel stuff. So here we have the androgynous, doll-like and somewhat inhuman Slaanesh. A blank slate, a nothingness of form and person-hood onto which the onlooker can project their desires. A blank eyeless mask on top of a concealed form.
Eyes because it felt right to include some aspect of voyeurism

Tzeentch. So here I riffed a bit off hell boy and sacred hearts for the crown. Other than that I decided that clearly Tzeentch needed to be a corvid, little birdy hands entangled in a cats cradle, forked tongue to evoke some untrustworthy serpent imagery.
Riffing heavily off that murderboard meme, psychedelia, and very much trying to evoke the look of someone way down a conspiracy thread
Also I painted this having gone to bed at about 4.30am. I felt this was on brand for painting Tzeentch

Khorne: So khorne was an utter pain to do. In contrast to Slaanesh it is cluttered (Slaanesh was very deliberate quite minimalist). Khorne needs to be cluttered. Violence is messy. The hounds of khorne (lipless, horrible things) also made an appearance.
So the important thing here is Khorne is female. Notably Khorne here is not the stereotypical muscular warrior woman, she is slight to the point of frailty, breaking free of some bonds and still trapped by others, bloodied from fighting (her blood and the blood of others). Trying really to go for the anger against injustice, oppression, of fighting without power or necessarily hope, of pure anger. I wanted this to not be sexualised in the typical manner of female anger and violence.
A lot of what I am trying to do with these is to make the iconography make sense as something people would want instead of the Imperium, for it to be sympathetic and for the fall to chaos to be understandable.

Nurgle: Nurgle was tricky. My original plan was a skeleton surrounded by a swarm of locusts, but that didn't quite work as an idea.
My main concerns with Nurgle was that I did not want the portrayal to be a grotesque of any sort, as well as avoiding deformities and anything where the descriptor "corpulent" would be used.
So here we have an earthy, grandmotherly Nurgle, the carer and protector, yet still of decay and death (hence worms, moss, rats and a vulture). No halo, party because I forgot, partly because it just doesn't fit the aesthetic. Nurgle is gentle, kind and down to earth

There are significant numbers of things in all of these pictures. Easter eggs for the observant