In Rust We Trust: Simpso Shield Slam

I sculpted a shield!

In Rust We Trust is a wonderful Discord community that celebrates the “28” style of the miniature hobby, including kitbashing, sculpting and playing narrative style games. Excitingly, the discord group recently passed the 600 member mark, suggesting how a niche aspect of the miniature hobby is growing in popularity! To celebrate this, they are holding a contest encouraging people to experiment with sculpting using modeling putty. Specifically they teamed up with Tanner Simpson (@simpsominiatures) to create a contest to sculpt a face on a shield and send pictures to ‘inrustcommunity@gmail.com’ by September 30th 2023. Shields with faces on them are a classic element of GW designs in the 90s, championed by John Blanche himself. In the spirit of 90s design, I wanted to create a shield that paid homage to one of my favorite GW artists of that era, Wayne England. His style is iconic, with its grimacing skulls and warped faces, with taut skin, bulging veins, and singed hair.

The Pilgrym: Samael Urkston, Lord of Bones Complete!

Pain is an illusion of the senses, despair an illusion of the mind.

Having finished building quite a few members of the Church of the Red Athenæum, I realized that I need to start painting some of them, lest the summer arrive and they are all still grey plastic and green stuff.  Looking over the models that I built, Samael Urkston, the Church’s Chronicler, seemed like a good place to start.  The Wayne England tribute is one of my favorite models that I have ever created, and it seemed a good place to start painting, and experimenting with a suitable color scheme for the Church as a whole.  The model ended up taking quite a long time to paint, but I think the effort was well worth it, both to establish the Church’s image going forward and to honor the irreplaceable Wayne England.

The Pilgrym: Samael Urkston, Lord of Bones, A Tribute to Wayne England

The Emperor Expects.

The passing of Wayne England earlier this month hit my brothers and I pretty hard, as his art has become synonymous with our ideas of the 41st millennium. This caused us to reflect on his contributions to Warhammer 40,000 and to look back through his seminal 40k art.  Perusing his pieces brought us back to one particular illustration, one that completely encapsulates the grim-dark ethos of Warhammer 40,000.  The illustration that I speak of is of the sneering scribe inking skulls in the 3rd edition 40k rulebook.  The beak-like nose, frazzled hair, and stretched skin combine to create a wonderfully macabre character.  Seeing this artwork again inspired me to create a model for the Church of the Red Athenæum in his likeness. We had been planning to create a Chronicler for the Church, someone who keeps track of the bodily sacrifices and the Church death toll (and might have started to sell body parts on the side).  And what better than modeling our Chronicler after England’s iconic skull inker?  This lead to our creation of the Lord of Bones:

Dragged into Turbolasers Episode 3: The Wulfen, Frostgrave, and a Tribute to Wayne England

In memory of Wayne England, a visionary.

Starting a Dark Eldar army

Kruellagh the Vile - Des Hanley

Ever since their introduction in the 3rd Edition of Warhammer 40,000, the Dark Eldar have always peaked my interest. Portrayed as deeply depraved and sadistic raiders, traveling the void praying upon the unwary, the Dark Eldar have always been a force that demanded attention. Some of the original imagery done by Des Hanley and Wayne England is superb and still sticks with me today. The image of Kruellagh the Vile slaughtering that Imperial guardsman with her Soul Flayer is particularly memorable.