Stormcast Eternal Army 2022

 

  

 

How I Develop an Army Scheme - Case Study

Hello again friends,

Here’s a little insight into how I decide on what army to build next. After finishing my initial Kharadron force I’d been thinking about what vanguard-sized army to build next. I wanted to make a significant change from the satisfying-yet-slow approach of the extensive hand-painting I’d done on the sky dwarves.

My roommate and I moved recently into a lovely new flat that has allowed me to set up my first ever dedicated hobby table. Having all of my materials ready and available instead of needing to constantly set it them up and tear them down has been a huge boost for me in staying engaged with the hobby. This is particularly noticeable with the airbrush, which required a large amount of a setup previously that involve laying a canvas painting sheet over our kitchen table when no-one else was home.

So, I knew I wanted to make extensive use of the airbrush. I began looking online for techniques and tips and fell completely under the spell of Marco Frisoni. His youtube channel is superb, he’s a brilliant painter, and he’s got a great joyful vibe. I definitely recommend you check it out.

I particularly enjoyed his videos on:

• Blanchitsu Oil Washing
• Airbrush preshading and zenithal use
• Airbrushing with Inks to add color tones

Note that these videos are not exclusively about the above techniques, but provide strong examples of them that inspired me. I knew I wanted to try out some combination of these techniques so I dug out my old oil paints, and bought some inks to start experimenting with.

I felt that these techniques would work really well on models that have a lot of robes and metals on them. Robes in particular have always been a huge weakness of mine, as I’ve struggled in the past to know where to put highlights and how to push contrasts on large expanses of cloth. I settled on either Lumineth Realmlords or Sacrosanct Chamber Stormcast Eternals to experiment on, and got a box of each.

Before getting into the test models properly I slapped together some easy-to-build space marines I had lying around to see how the inks and my contrast paints would work through the airbrush, as well as how they’d interact with oil. It was very illuminating. Another thing to note is that for both the schemes below there were an additional 1-2 test models where I tried slight variations of the same thing, and the Stormcast I actually stripped before repainting them in a similar scheme to get what I wanted.

While it is a little exhausting, it is quite an organic experience to try out different things and make subtle alterations to how you approach different figures. It's quite satisfying to develop a strategy for an army-size project like this, especially when you’re pushing yourself and using new techniques. It saves you a huge amount of headache in the long run and means you can zero in on what you want and get a consistent looking force. One final note, make sure you write down every detail of your process so once you get the final result you haven't forget anything!

Here is what I came up with for the Lumineth and Stormcast test models:

This Lumineth scheme has a blue done with airbrush zenithal highlights using inks, and then I used a very heavy oil washing to make them grimy and grimdark. I really liked the idea of the typically-fancy looking Lumineth getting grimy and dirty, but I can’t say I loved the need to keep the colors bright silver and blue in order to show off the oil wash. I also didn’t really like the idea of having to do a really dirty or muddy base to give it visual continuity, messy bases don't really appeal to me.

This was my approach with the Stormcast, I didn’t use oils here but made extensive use of the airbrush where I did an initial zenithal highlight with a warm ivory tone, then sprayed a green contrast paint through the airbrush on the main robes which acted as a filter and kept the zenithal highlights underneath. After that I painted the armor by hand before airbrush shading everything with washes or inks from the bottom using sepia and earth tones. There were some final brushed highlights on the top portions of the robes/metals.

I really loved how all of this airbrush work accentuated the cloaks. It was the first time I’d felt like I’d done cloth justice, and had actually made a model look more 3D with my painting.

I also enjoyed the warm tones of the green/gold/brown color scheme and immediately had some strong thematic ideas in my head about where to go with it. The monk-like appearance of the Sacrosanct chamber led me to start thinking about flagstone bases that closely resembled the ones from these easy-to-build test models.

The finished test models.
Note that the white balance in this picture is off, and they are less yellowy than this.

I ended up finishing the models. and while I’ll likely tweak a bit of the shading to make it less heavy, this is pretty much exactly how I want them to look.

For the bases I’ve decided to try out Green Stuff World’s textured rolling pins with some sculpting material from a local arts store and so far, I’m very impressed. I'm planning on having them look like they're part of a monastery of some kind.

Given how much I liked the scheme, and the strong thematic impression that came out of it, I’ve decided to continue with the Stormcast army rather than the Lumineth. I’m looking forward to giving you more updates as they come together.

Thanks for reading!

Women Sculpts in Age of Sigmar

Howdy Friends,

Given my previous article on here discussing women sculpts in miniature wargaming, (part 1 / part 2) I thought it would be a appropriate to revisit the topic in light of Games Workshop's recent push to include female miniatures in new releases for the 'Stormcast Eternals', the flagship army for it's Age of Sigmar fantasy game.

With the release of Soul Wars boxed set, an overview of how GW is working to incorporate women into the Stormcast Eternals range might offer a focused discussion on how they are trying to change their sculpting practices when it comes to female representation.

I think we can now definitively conclude that GW is making a conscious effort to include women stormcast characters given the content of this box, we get the Knight-Incantor character as a hero, as well as the Castigator-Prime. Recently announced follow-up releases to the Soul Wars box offers numerous female sculpts in units associated with the newly released Sacrosanct Chamber, a major faction of the Stormcast Eternals. Women sculpts in units of Castigators, Sequitors, Evocaters and Celestar Ballista represent the first woman figures from the Stormcast line to be part of a standard unit and not a hero or named character. Additionally the cover art for standard core book for AoS 2.0  features a lone battle-hardened woman stormcast eternal.

Knight-Incantor

Castigator - Prime

The female representation within the Soul Wars box and subsequent Sacrosanct Chamber releases seems like a natural extension of GW testing the waters for women Stormcast models with Neave Blacktalon from the Blightwar box, as well as Angharad Brightshield from the Shadespire starter.

Angharad Brightshield

Neave Blacktalon

So how problematic (if at all) are they as depictions of women figures?  How do they conform or subvert larger trends in depicting women in fantasy?  How do they appear in relation to other representations of women in the GW range?

In my view all of these stormcast figures, from the shadespire box onwards, do a few things well that I think really make them stand out in regards to depictions of women in miniature wargaming:

• Muscle-mass and size. I love that the women depicted here are the same size as their male stormcast brethren and are huge hyper-muscled badasses. Is it realistic? Not really, but then again neither is every guy looking like Hafthor Bjornsson. Is it cool as hell? Abso-goddamn-lutely. This is exactly the type of unrealistic power-trip depictions of bodies that men have been enjoying in their fantasy and sci-fi representation for decades. Yet I would posit the idea of having a really powerful body is in no way a specifically male fantasy, and there is no need to contain oneself within the limits of what is “realistic” given the completely fantastical nature of most miniature game settings. I like this idea of equalizing powerful bodies and making sure that whatever body types are being depicting are done so across genders. I also think that, in general, having everyone be muscly is a much more practical and less problematic choice than trying to “make male figures sexy too” and apply the male gaze to both genders. Special mention goes to the cover of the Core Book with its lady stormcast who looks seriously intimidating.
• No boob cavities. The boob armor is definitely still there outside of the cloaked Sequistors, but at least it is a uniform piece of armor that doesn’t have a cavity in the chest to better accentuate the breasts. I know this doesn’t sound like much but this is actually huge in women miniature designs. Individual “boob slots” in female armor is ubiquitous within wargaming miniatures across most systems. Now, I'd still posit that there really isn’t any actual need for armor to clearly depict breasts to imply a figure is a woman. I'd refer you to the excellent "Bikini Armor Battle Damage" tumblr which has been pointing this out effectively for years. Androgyny is a hallmark of properly-equipped combatants, and sculpts can make use of proportions to clearly communicate a combatant is a woman without relying on noticable boob armor. Despite this I still feel the stormcast women look a lot better than other sculpts with a pronounced chest cavity. Although unfortunately the artwork for the Core Book seems to bring this cavity back, which is my only criticism of said art.
• In general I think that the amount of armor stormcast eternals wear works well to communicate the combat-readiness of the women sculpts, there is almost no skin on display with any of these figures beyond Blacktalon and the Knight-Incantor having their heads exposed. (and blacktalon has a helmet option which is awesome)
• All the posing is good, these ladies are clearly fighting and not trying to draw the eye to boobs/bums/etc. Post-2012 GW is pretty good about posing women figures appropriately across the board,  even when other parts of the sculpt might be more problematic
• The Castigator-Prime model, and subsequent box of Sequitors that feature numerous women sculpts, are easily some of the best female sculpts i’ve seen across any game system. Specifically because they manage to make effective use of non-sexualized proportions to clearly communicate that a given figure is a woman without revealing (any!) skin or employing weird armor design. They are clearly a part of the Castigator unit, armored and equipped in the same way, and there is no boob-plate to be seen. I also like that each is part of a standard unit and isn’t singled out as a named character or hero figure, it suggests that we might see more women amongst the ranks of human-like AoS/40k armies and I’m all for it.

Conclusions: I’m very positive about these figures and what they indicate in regards to GW trying to make their systems more inviting to women players. They aren’t perfect but they are a big leap forward for GW and compare favourably with general depictions of women in fantasy settings across films/books/rpgs etc. Given how big GW is as a company, and the way it sets trends and precedents within the miniature wargaming industry, I really hope this is a sign of things to come.

Caveats: While I think the women stormcast eternals are the best of what GW has to offer in regards to women figures across all of their ranges (with the possible exception of the Tau who are very gender-neutral in appearance), that doesn’t mean we can ignore their other women sculpts that are less positive. In particular i would single out the Daughters of Khaine and the Adeptus Ministorum (aka: Sisters of Battle) as ranges that remain, at best, ambiguous in regards to how problematic they are in their depictions of women. None of the post 2012 sculpts for either of these ranges has been deeply problematic, but none have struck me as being particularly great either. I think with the stormcasts we are seeing GW get the opportunity to set new standards for how they want to depict women, whereas with the DoK and SoB they are struggling to break out of the orbit of earlier highly-sexualized design choices. I really do think that the Sisters of Battle plastic releases are going to make-or-break my thoughts as to whether GW is genuinely pushing for better representation or is fine with  just being “okay” when it comes to depicting women in their sculpts.

So that's my initial thoughts on these figures. I'm extremely happy to see this sort of work coming from Games Workshop and I'm hoping that they continue the trend across their own line and have an influence on the industry as a whole. Thanks for reading and i'll leave you with some of the other fantastic women sculpts from the new Sacrosanct Chamber range!

Sequitor Leader

Sequitors Unit - excellent stuff here!
I also like that we're seeing a combatant of colour in the official studio schemes as well!

Evocaters

Lord Arcanum

Celestar Ballista - more great design work here!