359 models. Each with a unique paint job.
The true delight of nostalgia isn’t going back to something treasured. It’s going back to something treasured that wasn’t possible at the time. This is the joy the younger you waited so long for that they’re gone, and you must have it for them.
As such, we felt quite honored to be commissioned to help with a Skaven army to be painted in the style of Andy Chambers's Skaven army in White Dwarf 137. It was an Oldhammer Warhammer Fantasy army with 359 figures. Almost all of them were out of print metal castings that we had never seen before.
Here’s how we did it.
Who is Andy Chambers?
Andy Chambers a game designer who has worked for Games Workshop for over 25 years. He helped create 40k, among other games, and adores Skaven, Tyranids, and Orcs, which are also my favorite armies :) .
One of the things he is best remembered for is his Skaven army which was showcased in WD 137 in 1991. The army is a riot of colour, styles, and character. No two figures in it are alike - it is, legit, and all-character horde army. The army inspired many gamers to not only start collecting Skaven, but to also try and create their own Andy Chambers style army.
Our brief was to do one. Straightforward yes? Sure -- but which Andy Chambers army?
Which Andy Chambers SKAVEN army?
Lighting affects photos. How well a photograph captures the brightness and tones of something is very much a function of the amount and quality of the light at the time. Photography literally means "drawing with light," for a reason.
Then, there's printing. Even if someone takes a fantastic photograph, how well will that be translated, in print? Go look at any of the yellowed, saturated comics of the 1970s and 80s and compare that to the quality of any graphic novel, today, and you can see the problem. A photographer can do their best to capture what they’re seeing. The printer, however, will then just shrug and stamp on the photographer’s dreams.
Recall the outstanding and inspirational artwork by John Blanche in the Mordheim rulebook. He actually did all that in color. Blanche never intended for the Mordheim rulebook to be black and white. What we understand of the early years of GW art is constrained by the limits of the publishing tools available to GW at the time.
Herein was our first problem. What color are these minis below?
Is this what they actually look like, or is that just the photography?
Or, is it just the printing? Or both?
Fortunately, Andy Chambers later reshot his Skaven. Here are some images of what the army actually looks like, as shown in John Wombat’s blog post and interview with Chambers:
This however created a new problem. The Andy Chambers army as it actually is, is not the army that people were inspired by. They were inspired by the yellow-looking army in WD 137. This has lead to interpretations like this, by Nico on his Realms of Chaos blog:
In the end, we decided to go for composite look. Part ‘actual’, part ‘inspired by.’
Decoding Andy Chambers’ Painting Style
No one interested in a practical outcome has time to paint every single figure in a horde army in a unique style. Chambers was no exception here (just look at how he painted the base trims…).
We studied images of his work and realized that his painting was actually quite straightforward. What he had done to create so much character was to employ a set of different techniques that he mixed and matched across all the figures. No one figure has them all applied, or in the same way. The net result was a horde army of characters.
Unit Colour Schemes
This was the easy bit. First, we had to work out what general color schemes each unit had. For some, we had to "reverse engineer" the colors from the White Dwarf images. For others, it was more straightforward, working off Chambers later photographs.
Stylistic Elements (this is the good stuff)
This took bit more time. Going over images of his work, we noticed the following elements:
Each element was applied with variations. No one figure had every element, and the variations in execution, added another layer of uniqueness.
So herein was the key. We just had to:
-Mix the figures in each unit, into small groups
-Apply a different stylistic element to each group
-Mix the figures together, and split them again into small groups
-Aply a a second round of different stylistic elements
-And so on.
We drew the line at three styles per figure unless they were HQ/character minis. This was because otherwise the figures would become too busy, and become visually hard to read.
Here is how it went!
This army was painted to Showcase Quality.
It was fun to try and get into another painter’s head and try to figure out what he had been thinking. We learned a lot doing this commission. It was an honor, and speaking for myself, one of the high points of my time at Paintedfigs.
Paintedfigs is a commission miniature painting service. You can send us your figurines to paint, and we also have painted miniatures for sale. We paint mainly Games Workshop (Warhammer 40k, Warhammer Fantasy, Age of Sigmar, Necromunda, Space Hulk, Bloodbowl, and so on), Star Wars, Warmachine and Hordes, and pretty much every Kickstarter and board game under the sun.
And we do so at the lowest rates on Earth (we’ve checked).
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