Lelith cold turkey

yes it makes them look somewhat vulnerable and dependant and not arrogant and superior

Quote :

Also, the Venom's upper Splinter Cannon appears to be blatantly shooting at other DE craft.

Honestly the most realistic thing about the image.

What's with the return of Wyches with hair four times the size of their head? Sure it's a callback to the old models...I think...but despite the merits of 3E metal, the hair is something I'd rather forget.

Did anyone complaining here ever heard of "artistic freedom" ?

sure i heard of it, but every piece of art, especially if it's depicting something already estblished, is bound to criticism
just because the artist has freedom to do what he wants, doesnt mean I have to like it
and as it seems, I'm not alone

SleepyPillow wrote:

Did anyone complaining here ever heard of "artistic freedom" ?

We aren’t talking about street artists, we are talking about a specific product that is meant to convey a mood. It is as much a form a marketing as it is “art”. In this regard, the art fails hard.

The thing is that right now, with the pace GW has, they cannot have one artist doing all the illustrations of the books.

It's pretty hard, so they need to have many artists working at the same time, withing the boundaries of a given style, which for warhammer is pretty much, realistic lighting but with fantastic licencese.

So it's normal that all images are not going to be the same quality because artists have different styles, even though they are working within the same boundaries as given by the art director.

Ikol wrote:

Things like this become very apparent when you look at, say, that atrocious double page spread they've got for the start/ end of the books and on page 4/5.

It's gritty and realistic - but too clean.  At the same time, all of the Kabalite's have these weird little triangle cones as their back-plates as opposed to the segmented spine armour bracketed by energy sumps.

For a second, the Incubi are lacking their famed back-spines and all of the armour just looks... wrong.  Like its poorly faked.

Add to that, the composition is crappy, there's very little going on in the foreground and the background is just big empty space with nothing of note to observe beyond some spiky specks we infer as a webway portal and some fliers.



Then you look at pages 72 and 73, which gives you a lovely comparison of the 5th ed Talos art (colourised) in all its gritty glory next to the new-style art of the Cronos.

And whilst it's not a bad rendition of the Cronos, that side by side really highlights the difference in styles for me.

Or again, their pseudo-Wracks in the new style against the old-style Wracks.



The new style just hurts my eyes, frankly.

I think that's a great piece of art. I mean, it's the style of Igor Sid, and if you check his other work, he's a brilliant artist and illustrator.
The thing is that you cannot ask the same from every artist, if you go and check his work you will she that he is great.

That image is actually very well thought, with a very clear path and decided focal points, with great selective rendering, and a clear central focal point which is the Archon. I have noticed tho, that the printing doesn't make justice to the original image, which you can see here. Igor Sid

sposada4 wrote:

I think that's a great piece of art. I mean, it's the style of Igor Sid, and if you check his other work, he's a brilliant artist and illustrator.
The thing is that you cannot ask the same from every artist, if you go and check his work you will she that he is great.

That image is actually very well thought, with a very clear path and decided focal points, with great selective rendering, and a clear central focal point which is the Archon. I have noticed tho, that the printing doesn't make justice to the original image, which you can see here. Igor Sid

I have seen it on Artstation as well and found the piece to look much better there, but I feel this is also down to how each artist "gets" 40k and the specific army they are trying to portray. Sometimes the very same artist can produce a fantastic scene one time and a pretty flat scene the next - there's so much more to art than just the picture being sent in to GW. Like you outlined, how the piece is used is important too - I am not a fan of two-page spreads for this very reason - often enough, the way it is set in the cover butchers the picture, with the focus that usually is in the center being deformed and impossible to properly see without breaking the spine of the book.

But there is also a great deal of subjectivity involved. For example, I loathed most of 5e artwork in the codices when it came to Space Marines - they all looked like bloated monstrosities with tiny, screeching heads (Codex Grey Knights in particular), and 6e taking those very same sketchy pieces, but colouring them only made it all the more obvious. In this sense, I actually prefer the various views of what a space marine looks like and it usually involves them looking anatomically better, even if a lot cleaner.

Our 5e codex has pretty good illustrations, but they are very, very dark in terms of colour (works with the theme of course). Were they made brighter, one would quickly note that in most every piece, the Dark Kin have that very same "faces of turbometh" thing going on, that they too are very sketchy and with visible brush strokes - that's just Paul Dainton's style though. Nearly all of those pictures are 3x4" format and apart from David Gallagher's character art that has very characteristic way he does detail, you can't make out that much. The current artwork goes for large one character shots across the entire page - quite the difference in scale, even though the work file is most likely the same as the one used way back in 5e (though Gallagher's stuff is definitely done traditionally). Hell, the current 8e Craftworlds codex in many places uses the same pieces from 5e, just coloured and upscaled to full half of a page! I do not have 6e Dark Eldar codex on hand, but I recall it had several pieces done by Hardy Fowler and he's definitely a very talented artist with a vast portfolio, but he has a very specific "look" to him that his Wyches had as well, and they still had that "faces of turbometh" thing going on, just in Fowler's "Malifaux" style.

Still, it is very clear that the majority of the new illustrations in the codex are done by one guy - I counted 30 (!) character pieces from him. That's a lot. We can only guess the schedule and the deadlines on all these pieces, how many iterations there were and so on. I have a suspicion that these are done by Paul Dainton as well, simply by the guess that they'd most likely just have one of their in-house guys do such a quantity of artwork for a project, as coordinating such an amount with freelancers would be supremely difficult. I doubt this is his only project, either (Daughters of Khaine book has this same style to it), so the schedule might very well be super tight. So in this sea of guesswork, we have a long-standing studio guy with a that's asked to machinegun out 30 pieces in a short time before going on to the next book. Yes, the individual quality may indeed suffer, but it's also a question of the overall formatting of the book and it needing to be full colour.

So, to sum up my ramble, artwork ain't such an easy thing. The same artist can be the author both of your favourite artwork and one you don't feel all to keen due to a myriad of factors, none of which are tied to their talent. With such a tight book release schedule GW has these days with both 40k and AoS, it is only logical that even with a mass of new artists, you still can't keep up and make every piece as good as back in the day with 4-8 book releases a year - and even then there were some real stinkers printed on the pages!

Ah go on then, I might as well voice the unpopular opinion!

Personally, I quite like the slightly smudgy, blurry, style. Now, I'm no artist, not but by a long stretch, but I'm a big fan of anything that appeals to my sense of the "other worldly". To me, this is what that blurry style achieves: it gives the impression of something not natural, something not right, something other. Something that the mere slave races cannot fully comprehend. The haemonculus on p.35 looks great imo; he isn't defined properly, and his facelessness makes him all the more freaky and intimidating. In fact, the Covens probably got the best usage out of this, though the wych on p.28 also looks great! You get a feel for her motion!

There are definitely some flubs, sure, but then not every piece of art belongs in a gallery. Though I'm not dismissing them, I see no need to harp on a negative. On the note of the big art-spread across pp.4-5, there are some odd details that don't make sense to the fluff or models, but I get the feeling the artist was going for "rule of cool" and what appealed to their own tastes. Drukhari are known for being narcissists beyond reason, let the artist spin it their own way! Yeees it's an official book, yeees it probably should represent the models being sold accurately, yeees it's not what I want, but geez I guarantee that most of us have a conversion that doesn't that doesn't fit the typical style. The Archon is facing away from the enemy to act as a kind of commander, I'm guessing, though the pose could represent that more. It's not a perfect piece, no, but then I don't know many that are.

Siticus the Ancient wrote:

sposada4 wrote:

I think that's a great piece of art. I mean, it's the style of Igor Sid, and if you check his other work, he's a brilliant artist and illustrator.
The thing is that you cannot ask the same from every artist, if you go and check his work you will she that he is great.

That image is actually very well thought, with a very clear path and decided focal points, with great selective rendering, and a clear central focal point which is the Archon. I have noticed tho, that the printing doesn't make justice to the original image, which you can see here. Igor Sid

I have seen it on Artstation as well and found the piece to look much better there, but I feel this is also down to how each artist "gets" 40k and the specific army they are trying to portray. Sometimes the very same artist can produce a fantastic scene one time and a pretty flat scene the next - there's so much more to art than just the picture being sent in to GW. Like you outlined, how the piece is used is important too - I am not a fan of two-page spreads for this very reason - often enough, the way it is set in the cover butchers the picture, with the focus that usually is in the center being deformed and impossible to properly see without breaking the spine of the book.

But there is also a great deal of subjectivity involved. For example, I loathed most of 5e artwork in the codices when it came to Space Marines - they all looked like bloated monstrosities with tiny, screeching heads (Codex Grey Knights in particular), and 6e taking those very same sketchy pieces, but colouring them only made it all the more obvious. In this sense, I actually prefer the various views of what a space marine looks like and it usually involves them looking anatomically better, even if a lot cleaner.

Our 5e codex has pretty good illustrations, but they are very, very dark in terms of colour (works with the theme of course). Were they made brighter, one would quickly note that in most every piece, the Dark Kin have that very same "faces of turbometh" thing going on, that they too are very sketchy and with visible brush strokes - that's just Paul Dainton's style though. Nearly all of those pictures are 3x4" format and apart from David Gallagher's character art that has very characteristic way he does detail, you can't make out that much. The current artwork goes for large one character shots across the entire page - quite the difference in scale, even though the work file is most likely the same as the one used way back in 5e (though Gallagher's stuff is definitely done traditionally). Hell, the current 8e Craftworlds codex in many places uses the same pieces from 5e, just coloured and upscaled to full half of a page! I do not have 6e Dark Eldar codex on hand, but I recall it had several pieces done by Hardy Fowler and he's definitely a very talented artist with a vast portfolio, but he has a very specific "look" to him that his Wyches had as well, and they still had that "faces of turbometh" thing going on, just in Fowler's "Malifaux" style.

Still, it is very clear that the majority of the new illustrations in the codex are done by one guy - I counted 30 (!) character pieces from him. That's a lot. We can only guess the schedule and the deadlines on all these pieces, how many iterations there were and so on. I have a suspicion that these are done by Paul Dainton as well, simply by the guess that they'd most likely just have one of their in-house guys do such a quantity of artwork for a project, as coordinating such an amount with freelancers would be supremely difficult. I doubt this is his only project, either (Daughters of Khaine book has this same style to it), so the schedule might very well be super tight. So in this sea of guesswork, we have a long-standing studio guy with a that's asked to machinegun out 30 pieces in a short time before going on to the next book. Yes, the individual quality may indeed suffer, but it's also a question of the overall formatting of the book and it needing to be full colour.

So, to sum up my ramble, artwork ain't such an easy thing. The same artist can be the author both of your favourite artwork and one you don't feel all to keen due to a myriad of factors, none of which are tied to their talent. With such a tight book release schedule GW has these days with both 40k and AoS, it is only logical that even with a mass of new artists, you still can't keep up and make every piece as good as back in the day with 4-8 book releases a year - and even then there were some real stinkers printed on the pages!

I agree that double spreads freaking butcher the nice pieces. That's very much true.

I think it is a combination of several things already mentioned: multiple artists, GW wanting to carve out their own IP image (moving away from space elves, aesthetically, as much as possible), DE being considered evil - so they can't be "healthy beautiful", etc.

In general i believe that image tells a lot more about the race it represents than the 5th ed one, it isn't bad per se. However, for Lelith specifically, who is said to be strikingly beautiful, it doesn't fit her much... unless it's taken when she just got up early after a busy night.

Aside the talks about quality or general aesthetics, looking only and specifically at the Lelith side-by-side?
40k is too horny, and needs to be much less so. (If I ever have another conversation with someone who insists that I'm reading way too much into the fact that Sisters of Battle are stripped naked and whipped whenever they've been naughty, I can't be held accountable for what comes next).
I'm all for "horny drawings of slutty space elves" becoming "freaky drawings of psychotic evil space elves". One reason I play DE is because it's the closest we have to an egalitarian army in the game, and Barefoot Thong Supermodel can go hang as an aesthetic.

mynamelegend wrote:

Aside the talks about quality or general aesthetics, looking only and specifically at the Lelith side-by-side?
40k is too horny, and needs to be much less so. (If I ever have another conversation with someone who insists that I'm reading way too much into the fact that Sisters of Battle are stripped naked and whipped whenever they've been naughty, I can't be held accountable for what comes next).
I'm all for "horny drawings of slutty space elves" becoming "freaky drawings of psychotic evil space elves". One reason I play DE is because it's the closest we have to an egalitarian army in the game, and Barefoot Thong Supermodel can go hang as an aesthetic.

what in the name of vect our lord and saviour

"Evil Space Elf Drawing" > "Bikini Babe Space Elf Drawing"

I understood your point, i just don't share your opinion

I like it. Makes the Drukhari seem more grungy and punk-rock than their nerd Craftworld cousins which is where I always thought they should be.

I think we should do both. Just ask the local Haemonculus. We thrive uber extremes, right?

Sent from Topic'it App

CptMetal wrote:

I think we should do both. Just ask the local Haemonculus. We thrive uber extremes, right?

Sent from Topic'it App

exactly what i think, wyches should look appealing to the audience and kabalites should look like the worst nightmare of the lesser races

mynamelegend wrote:

Aside the talks about quality or general aesthetics, looking only and specifically at the Lelith side-by-side?
40k is too horny, and needs to be much less so. (If I ever have another conversation with someone who insists that I'm reading way too much into the fact that Sisters of Battle are stripped naked and whipped whenever they've been naughty, I can't be held accountable for what comes next).
I'm all for "horny drawings of slutty space elves" becoming "freaky drawings of psychotic evil space elves". One reason I play DE is because it's the closest we have to an egalitarian army in the game, and Barefoot Thong Supermodel can go hang as an aesthetic.

What on earth is this? You're playing the most sexualized faction in the 40K universe bruh (ok, maybe Slannesh demons might have something to say about that, but nobody plays pure slannesh). Definitely with more overt sexy-ness than the sisters of battle who are, at the very least, religiously-repressed sexy. I mean, Drukhari have this model included in their faction:

https://www.google.com/search?q=drukhari+prisoners&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwivvLWJ8fHbAhXjGTQIHccCB88Q_AUICigB&biw=1920&bih=974#imgrc=RGRJeIgHARqFAM:

Drukhari are overtly S&M. That's part of the faction, and I hope it never changes. It goes hand in hand with the psycho, drug-fueled rocker aesthetic that been a major "theme" of the Dark Eldar since the beginning. Why would we get rid of one of the major themes of the army that goes on raiding parties to capture gladiators and sex-slaves from other races?

What other factions are over-sexualized besides Druhkari, Slannesh and a maybe couple of the SoB models (most are in tanky, chunky armor)? 40K has tons of factions, and having lots of sexy women (/aelves) in 2.5 of them is fine. There are non-sexualized females in Tau, Eldar, Sisters of Silence, Harlequins, and even Tyranids if we're talking biological gender. If you really wanted SJW 'equality' females I hear they're still selling Tau models for the greater good. . .

mynamelegend wrote:

I'm all for "horny drawings of slutty space elves" becoming "freaky drawings of psychotic evil space elves". One reason I play DE is because it's the closest we have to an egalitarian army in the game, and Barefoot Thong Supermodel can go hang as an aesthetic.

Preach.

I am waiting patiently for 40k to lose its very gendered cliches...

Even why Incubi, Haemonculi, and Succubi would be gendered at all is beyond me, but it's not as bad as Astartes at least.

Maybe 9th Edition

lcfr wrote:

mynamelegend wrote:

I'm all for "horny drawings of slutty space elves" becoming "freaky drawings of psychotic evil space elves". One reason I play DE is because it's the closest we have to an egalitarian army in the game, and Barefoot Thong Supermodel can go hang as an aesthetic.

Preach.

I am waiting patiently for 40k to lose its very gendered cliches...

Even why Incubi, Haemonculi, and Succubi would be gendered at all is beyond me, but it's not as bad as Astartes at least.

Maybe 9th Edition

No offense but I hope folks that are bothered by Space Marines gender issues are never in charge of this game.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO DON'T YOU DARE INFEST MY BEAUTIFUL THREAD WITH THIS NONSENSICAL DEBATE

AzraeI wrote:

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO DON'T YOU DARE INFEST MY BEAUTIFUL THREAD WITH THIS NONSENSICAL DEBATE

I'm with you man, I want sexy Lelith back ha ha. Just pushing back against those bringing that dreaded debate here. Sorry if I fed the trolls.

AzraeI wrote:

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO DON'T YOU DARE INFEST MY BEAUTIFUL THREAD WITH THIS NONSENSICAL DEBATE

What have you done?

dumpeal wrote:

AzraeI wrote:

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO DON'T YOU DARE INFEST MY BEAUTIFUL THREAD WITH THIS NONSENSICAL DEBATE

What have you done?

I don't know