Warhammer AoS – A Storm(cast) is coming!

Normally, my strategy when writing an article is to lead with pictures and then if I have anything wordy to say, bury it at the bottom so you can choose to read or skip it, if you want.  Today, I’m going to do the opposite because I think it will give some context to what I’m working on.

In the wake of Adepticon and Golden Demon, I knew that I needed to change up what I’m doing hobby wise if I want to receive different results in the future.  After giving it some thought, I believe that I’ve run into a couple of problems. The first is that I had more or less stagnating on learning new things. For example, I learned a system for painting NMM (see Darren Latham’s blog or a Juan Hidalgo Youtube video to learn more) and used it fairly effectively. However, not only is that information common knowledge but its also not as impressive as it once was. Upper echelon painters are doing things to make miniatures look even more realistic than that. Obviously, if I want to reach the heights of miniature painting then I’m going to have to try and catch up.

Another problem is that I unwittingly put myself in a situation where I was a big fish in a small sea.  By focusing on Middle Earth for display projects like I have done for the past 6-12 months, I unintentionally wasn’t being exposed to what the highest level painters were working on.  Middle Earth is a small community and to be frank, there aren’t a ton of people who focus on display painting within that community.  I don’t want to diminish those who do, because there are some talented people that don’t enter in painting competitions and aren’t widely known outside of the Middle Earth community.  Having said that, it wouldn’t be hard for me to paint something in Middle Earth and for it to be one of the best things I’ve seen painted. That is, of course, until Golden Demon rolls around.

I think there is a perception amongst serious painters that Middle Earth is potentially an “easy” way to get a Golden Demon trophy because the game was less popular than it is now and the quality of painting in the Golden Demon for LOTR was typically lower. There also tend to be fewer entries compared to Warhammer so it was easier to be in the top results.  There are painters who are supremely talented who enter the category now and those painters paint Warhammer primarily.  They’re dipping in to try and get another trophy or because one of the recent releases in Middle Earth caught their eye.  There’s no shame in that and its totally allowed by the Golden Demon rules as well.  You can enter in 10ish different categories if you’re a maniac and can paint something in each one. I doubt doing so will help you win but it goes to show that there really are no limitations in what you enter.

After doing some reverse engineering of this situation, I know that sticking to Middle Earth display painting is not a good formula for success.  I love Tolkien’s work and I like the minis GW is making (when they do make them…) but when I think about the projects I had in mind for the next year or two, almost none of them are going to teach me anything new beyond creating high quality bases.  The reason for that is most of them involve painting several of the same miniatures to tell a story.  So there is repetition in the painting but also many of the sculpts are not terribly complicated or challenging to paint.  For example, I had an idea to create a diorama of Easterlings prowling around their native lands.  It would be a cool way to explore part of Tolkien’s world that isn’t shown in any of the movies but it wasn’t going to push my skills because the Easterlings are pretty straightforward to paint and I know how to attack the various parts of the mini already.  So sticking to Middle Earth does not align with my goals right now. It likely means that the elves I bought and waited so patiently for will not be painted anytime soon and maybe not ever which is a bit of a shame but I think I have a better plan going forward.

What am I going to paint instead?  You can probably guess from the title.  More Warhammer.  And maybe some larger scale minis if I can get comfortable with those.  Over the last year or two, I can think of conversations I’ve had with regular commenters (particularly Wudugast) where I say, “Oh, X sculpt is really cool.  I’d love to paint that one day if I can ever find the time.”  Well, I will find some time for that sort of stuff going forward.  Not too long before I committed to painting LOTR for gaming purposes, about 4-5 years ago, I was actually painting Warhammer just for the joy of painting.  I wasn’t particularly good at that time but I learned a lot and it helped me improve so there’s no reason I can’t do it again.  There are a lot of great sculpts released by Games Workshop these days and while I don’t like some of the new factions in Age of Sigmar (Under the sea elves, for example), there is still plenty I’d love to paint.  I’ve learned over the years, that I have a surprisingly high amount of nostalgia for the factions that were released when I originally painted in the early 2000’s and that alone could probably keep me painting for a while.  And if GW releases the Old World with the old fantasy factions included then forget it.  I’ll have plenty of fun projects to work on for the foreseeable future.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be challenges along the way.  There are plenty of things in 40k that I don’t know or have never tried to paint before so I’m sure there will be some misfires along the way.  At the same time though, I’m going to try and really unleash my creativity and try to learn new techniques to improve as a painter.  I’ve had this sense in the last year or two that I’ve fallen behind some of the best painters in the world and they’re doing things that look great and I’m not sure how they do it.  So to improve this, I will be trying to learn what I can from Patreon and also from some of the hobby publications out there.  There is so much more out there you can learn nowadays and I’m going to try to be a student of the game and learn as much as I can.  I’m thinking I’ll write up reviews for some of the books and magazines I buy as well because it can be hard to find information about them online so hopefully some of you will find that interesting as well. I imagine I will enjoy talking about them.

So yeah, that’s the plan for 2023. I will definitely still be painting gaming stuff and trying to progress in all of my goals and projects there so it isn’t going to be all Warhammer all the time. It will be a little tricky to balance longer display projects with shorter gaming ones but I think I can make it work and I obviously want to improve further and do better in future painting competitions and this gives me the best path forward.

With all that said, let’s talk about what I’m working on. As the title suggests, I’m tackling another Stormcast. Truthfully, I was going to paint the lady knight from Cursed City, Emelda Braskov, which would have been a shorter project but I messed up painting her head so badly, I decided to reconsider and find a different sculpt. Fortunately, that was only a couple hours of painting time lost. So instead, I’m painting the Knight-Judicator which is one of the coolest looking ranged combat miniatures I’ve seen in a while. I’ll even be nice and include a picture of it below so you can see what I’m working towards for once. I’m not convinced that I will paint the Gryph Hounds because they don’t present any new or interesting painting challenges though I could turn them into a diorama, if I really wanted. We’ll see how that part of this project plays out.

I picked this miniature because I wanted to try and improve the way I paint metallic surfaces. That and I just really enjoy painting fantasy space marines apparently. The new things I’ve tried so far with this miniature is to use colder gold colors instead of warm gold like on pretty much every miniature I’ve painted with gold before. I’m also using the technique I described with the Ringwraith of taking a picture and figuring out where the light hits the miniature before applying any paint but this time, doing so with metallic surfaces. My hope was that if I painted all of the gold surfaces in one go, I’d speed up the painting time a bit. That hasn’t really happened and the back is much less finished than the front. I find it hard to take stock of that many different parts of the miniature at once and end up working on no more than two or three at once. Especially with all of the refining you have to do to make sure every part looks as good as possible. The front of the miniature is pretty refined at this point and I just need to add more edge highlights to finish the gold areas, in case you’re curious. The back is pretty much half done and is what the front looked like before refining. A lot of the metal will be covered by the cape so I’m hoping that it won’t take too much more time to finish. But anyway, enough rambling, here is the miniature.

That is (finally!) all I have left to say. Thank you as always for your patronage and this should be the last lengthy update for me for a while as my progress on this project will be somewhat slow and methodical in the coming weeks.