Admiral:
I was positively surprised by the Kharadron artwork. Some of it depict something of a living world, and imaginatively, too! Some memorable vivid pictures among the lot, mainly those of civilian nature. Some of it seem inspired, as opposed to run of the mill work output merely portraying miniatures in 2D. I’m not much interested in this kind of setting, but it still holds visual appeal.
GW artwork health sign: Stable.
Admiral:
Stumbled across this pretty thing on a search:
Ghrask Dragh:
I’m a huge fan of Mark Gibbons, not just because he gave us some of the best Chaos Dwarf artwork ever but warhammer in general.
Tried to pick out some of my fav that weren’t already posted above…
MadHatter:
The old artwork is iconic and handcrafted, I don’t like the photoshopped digital realistic stuff at all feels cheap to me in comparision and non-evocative :hat off
Admiral:
This is a beauty, done for FFG.
Just an ordinary day working for the Tech Priest.
tjub:
@Admiral, seems they just released patch 432.1. Time to upgrade!
Yodhrin:
Well, it took three years but my CDO account is finally usable, huzzah! Here’s as good a place as any to start posting.
I’m going to chime in on the “older was, on balance, better” side of the debate, for a couple of reasons. The first is variety; the modern “house style” is very polished, and doesn’t tend to produce any “bad” - in the sense of having questionable technical execution - images, but the price of that consistency has been variety, both in style and subject. Blanche, Wayne England, Gibbons, Kopinski, and all the others over the years provided many different windows into the WHF and 40K settings, there was a perspective to suit almost every taste, and I think GW’s products definitely lost something when they made their two recent changes in direction on art; first in the period where they desperately tried to fill out books with material of seriously questionable quality from freelancers that often looked like middling quality Deviantart fanart more than anything else(likely due in large part to GW not giving the artists much time or creative license), and then again more recently when they switched to their presently-evident “house style” that seems to my eye very much a refinement of the sort of perspective you used to see from Kopinski. Now I like Kopinski’s art fine, but I like it better as part of a kind of “spectrum of weirdness” with Blanche at the other end like we used to have.
The second is due to the shift to producing images digitally(an issue that also applies in similar terms to creating the miniatures themselves). Now I’m by no means a Luddite, and I don’t hold for a moment that you can’t produce good art using digital tools, but IMO they make it too easy to make things too perfect. The artist keeps going back, again and again, to fix “flaws” they see in the piece, and by the time they’re finally finished it looks…plastic. Combined with the IP-paranoia driven restriction in subject matter, I think that’s what a lot of folk are seeing when they look at a piece and think it doesn’t have any “soul”.
For me personally as well, the subject matter is an issue. I can’t really find any emotional resonance with Age of Sigmar or Dark Imperium art because I don’t find either setting engaging or exciting - I had a brief spike of interest in the former with the Kharadron book, but I couldn’t maintain it because they exist within the totality that is AoS and I don’t care for that totality, which seems to insist on retaining just enough familiarity that all it does is remind me how much more I liked WHF. I expect that same underlying issue will colour some criticism of the newer art.