WarhammerFest: Golden Demon Entries

Catching up on the photos I took at WarhammerFest, here's the last of the photo posts. I've got a rambly text post to come about ideas being sparked by seeing other people's hobby, but that's for later.

I wasn't going to  take photos of the Golden Demon entries this year, as the photos are never very good and the painters often put up their own photos on their own blogs taken in much better conditions. And then I saw this absolutely gorgeous unit of Mordheim Averlanders, and I absolutely had to start taking a few photos.

I don't really have very much to say about all these photos, so I'm going to restrict myself to the odd comment of my thoughts. In this case, it's just some lovely Slaanesh demons, which I was very nearly tempted into starting an army of.

This photo catches the manic energy of the new "Gloomspite Gitz" without getting too cartoony.

This horrible monster, with all it's heavy conversion work, caught my eye immediately.

An adorable troll. The hole in the ground looks like a yawning mouth, too.

The new troll models are gorgeous and full of things that a painter can use to show off their techniques on, so it's not a surprise they're popular this year.

Lovely bright colours on this one.

Creepy Great Unclean One conversion with a bell tower growing out of his back.

More Oldhammer, in terms of a classic Ogre and the "Moon Knight". I definitely want to own both of these, and don't.

Unsubtle political campaigning as part of an entry...

A Harlequin Shadowseer conversion where the chest has been hollowed out to glow and change colours.

Another ornate tower, this time growing out of the back of a Renegade Knight.

Louise Sugden entered her Squat bounty hunter into the Open Category (winning a well deserved finalist pin).

There was even a Heroquest Fimir making up the ranks of the old classics on display.

Someone had painted up all the weird little Nurglings you get with other Nurgle kits as a unit of Nurglings.

There was also this excellent mix of Forge World Bounty Hunters for Necromunda mixed in with some excellent kit bashes and conversions.

WarhammerFest: New Models

There were a whole bunch of new and exciting models at WarhammerFest this year. I'm currently on a big Age of Sigmar interest kick, so the new models for WarCry interested me in particular. These are some flying beasts of some kind.

One of the new warbands, which have been previewed before, but was good to see in the flesh. I'm really curious how they got that lovely bronze armour effect.

Another warband, this one from the Realm of Beasts. Lots of bone weapons and a critter friend.

New Fury models are coming. The old ones are incredibly old and tired, particularly when you look at how ridiculously dynamic these ones are. Definitely excited by these.

Another warband was announced for Warcry at the event. This is a creepy snake cult, including at least one chaotic aelf. Curious for this new game now!

There's also a Skitarii transport coming for the Adeptus Mechanicus. I love the weird hover vehicle / opened top look to it.

And a very retro / hovercraft look to the back end of it, with fins behind turbines to steer.

You can also build it as some kind of tank thing as well. That front end looks very retro sci fi!

Meanwhile, on the Forgeworld side of things, the Armiger Knights got some resin add ons, which I really like the look of.

My understanding is that they're for Heresy, but will have rules in normal 40K as well. You can see the super heavy drill transport, based on the old Epic Mole, on the shelf below, too.

There's also this giant knight that's getting close to Warhound size. I haven't learned it's name yet.

There were some painted examples of the new knight kits I managed to get a picture of as well. This one is painted as one of the rebel houses from the Heresy.

This Mechanicum knight has a bunch of weird techno weapons that will likely do terrible things.

I believe the kids would call this an "absolute unit"? That's all my pictures of new stuff from WarhammerFest, but I've still got photos of other stuff I saw while I was there still to come...

WarhammerFest: Contrast Paints

If you hadn't heard already, Games Workshop is bringing out a new range of paints, called "Contrast Paints". The basic concept of them is that they are higher pigment not quite washes that can paint a model in a single coat over a white undercoat. Games Workshop is keen to push these, and has even created a new paint website to explain it all.

These paints are obviously super useful for anyone who's starting out, or who wants to get an army done in a hurry to a basic standard. But they're not restricted to that. This is an example Stormcast (I think from Warhammer Underworlds) that has been painted in contrast paint, with a simple edge highlight over the top. While clearly done by a skilled painter, we shouldn't be writing these off as just for the newer folk.

This Nurgle Plague Marine, however, is just contrast paints and nothing else. That's pretty exciting for me as it's clearly done to quite a good standard, and should really speed up painting.

Meanwhile, here's a Chainrasp who had a zenithal undercoat before the contrast paints were applied. There's going to be a lot of cool and interesting techniques to discover with these, as they're a new tool for the arsenal.

There were some paint stations where you could try out the new paints yourself with a figure they supplied. I picked possibly one of my favourite Stormcast models of all time. There are two new undercoats. Both off white (for better coverage) one bone and one grey - Wraithbone and Grey Seer, respectively.

I tried out the yellow on the helmet first. Bluntly, it's great and sneaky wizardry that I resent not having had access to earlier.

I wasn't as much of a fan of this dark blue, but look at how thick you need to put it on to get it to work right. It dries thin without obscuring details, though. They did indicate that it will not be as robust as their existing range so it'll be worth giving it a coat of varnish or two - and they're also updating their varnish range, conveniently...

So, here's where I ran out of time. I tried some wet blending and playing around, relatively unsuccessfully. You likely want to treat them like watercolours, and paint light to dark colours as you go. There's a base coat that matches the undercoat if you screw something up, but we didn't have any available to play around with on the day.

I painted the shield in the new "Snakebite Leather" - a throwback name some people will remember. It's not exactly the same but I co-incidentally utterly love what it does.

I keep looking at that cloak thinking that it will just pop with a little bit of dry-brushing and maybe a little highlight. But for a first pass, gaming standard piece, it's good.

Here you can see where a couple of attempts at blending have gone wrong, or where over-paint has happened. It's remarkably easy to do, so you'll want to be super precise with these new paints, or you'll have to do a lot more work correcting them. These are definitely a case of "more haste, less speed".

All in all, I'm super excited for these new paints. I think they're going to massively help with me getting more models painted, and I want to spend a bunch of time learning what they can and can't do. I'm super stoked to get the painting desk operational again!

Warhammer Fest and the changes at Games Workshop

So, the other weekend, my wife and I headed down to Warhammer Fest for a pleasant weekend of geekery and nonsense. By now I expect most of you who keep track of the wargaming news will have seen most of the new stuff announced at the event. If you haven't, I recommend the live feed page Games Workshop themselves put out here.

Trish has finally finished the Khornate Dragon

There are two big changes front and centre at Warhammer Fest. The first was previews - showing things in advance of their pre-order date. The second was more about representation and in particular a better balance of female representation.

A whole bunch of new stuff got announced at Warhammer Fest - a new edition of Age of Sigmar, two updates to AoS factions, the render of the next plastic Sister of Battle, the Dark Elf Blood Bowl team, Adeptus Titanicus, and that Cawdor are coming next for Necromunda. It's saying something that I didn't get to go to the Forge World Seminar as the tickets went too quickly, but that I didn't really mind...

Also, if you looked around, you could see other previews that hadn't even been announced on display in miniature cabinets, as demo items on people's desks, and so on. There was a lot of openness about the next three months.

I'm certainly interested in the new Adeptus Titanicus game. The buy in price point is likely to be a little high, but this is really nice stuff so I'm not too worried. It looks like it's going to be an interesting game focussing on the titans, with mention of the need to focus on your reactor management, and having cards available to configure your titans. The models also come with slots to magnetise all the weapons.

The other side to the changes were the number of really good female models of varying types. The new Stormcast Chamber has a high proportion of women, with sensible armour.

Also, the way the line infantry's armour has been modelled is rather androgynous, allowing for either make or female heads to be added without a problem - and it looks like there's female heads available for the kit.

With a two year lead time for miniature design, Games Workshop needs to be really careful fixing its historical problems. If they make a mis-step and do something wrong with their model design, from feedback to fix can be months or years. They seem to be aware of this, though, and are making an effort to get it right first time.

On the Blood Bowl side of things, we're seeing more teams with women players from the start - the new Dark Elf team has a sensible mix of men and women, and while they dropped the ball on the starting human and orc teams, they've introduced some cool female star players and they seem willing to listen to feedback.

Cheerleaders are a problem. The real world concept for them is fundamentally pretty sexist, but Blood Bowl, parodying such things, and historically using them, is left in a difficult spot. The route they've chosen to take is to make cheerleader models, and to try and do them as sympathetically as they can in the circumstances.

Personally, I think this is the best approach they can take. With the number of third party suppliers in the market, there's a risk that if Forge World don't make cheerleaders, other companies will make really offensive ones to pander to the lowest denominator. This is a place where Games Workshop and Forge World can use their position as market leader to put out sensible cheerleader models and hopefully cut down on the profitability of the more offensive sexist tropes smaller companies might be tempted to make.

Hence, in this particular case, orcs in the Blood Bowl universe have women again, rather than being fungus. The approach they've chosen to take is that these are some of the bigger, burlier orcs (who happen to be female) who cheer the players on with threats of violence if they don't play better. I think that's probably a better comic approach than some of the more outright offensive options taken in the past.

All in all, I'm really interested in how Games Workshop does with all this change. It's always a challenge, but so far they seem to be broadly doing pretty well with it, and long may that continue!