With the Flesh-eater Courts Army Set just around the corner, our thoughts turn to putrid flesh, gore-encrusted weapons, and bleached bone… and how we might lovingly render those aspects on the new miniatures.
Lucky for us, we had the chance to talk to ’Eavy Metal Content Lead Max about how he and his team approached painting the maniacal and deluded servants of the all-powerful Carrion King.
Max: The Flesh-eater Courts have arrived in force, and they’ve brought a number of opportunities and challenges for the ’Eavy Metal team. The first challenge we came up against was the nature of their model range: they were a subset of the Vampire Counts in Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Even Seraphon are a fully-fledged faction with a pre-existing hierarchy, where each different unit stands out from another, and the Coalesced and Starborne have different colour schemes.
At the start of Warhammer Age of Sigmar, the background writers did a huge amount of work to create new lore, history, and sub-factions – and now we’re finally in a position with the new miniatures and the new tome to bring that all together into one whole. Each of the different Death factions has its own kind of visual identity: the ghostly magic of the Nighthaunt and the really saturated teal colours that are associated with them, the mismatched but naturalistic skeletons, zombies, and bats that create the supernatural smorgasbord of the Soulblight Gravelords, and the uniform, strict, and codified Ossiarch Bonereapers. Finally, we have the Flesh-eater Courts – the savage, barbaric and blood-soaked face of Death, coloured with a palette of sickly, gross-looking skin.
One thing that we wanted to do was really nail the fact that these are humans that have now turned into something else – something that’s not quite alive or dead. That brings an element of horror into the range, but one that’s different from your regular monsters in Death because this is something we can see humanity in, and in a tragic way.
With that in mind, the question became, “How do we engage with that on a visual level, and represent the humans from the Mortal Realms that have fallen to this curse? How would it affect them?” We didn’t want to just go, “Oh, the curse makes you red, or blue, or weird and pale”. We spent a lot of time looking at skin tones and trying to remember throughout the whole process that what we were painting was once human.
Because of this, we also didn’t want to end up in a position where you end up with one singular recipe for the faction. In a Space Marines army, you get breaths of fresh air with Chaplains and Apothecaries that give you some variation, so we had to think about what that looks like for ghouls. It’s essentially just skin across the board, so we had to settle on getting some realistic variation of skin tones.
We wanted to make sure that the Abhorrant Ghoul Kings, as vampires, looked exsanguinated and paler as opposed to Ghouls, who have more pinkness around the elbows, knees and so on – the suggestion that they are much closer to human still, even in their ghoulish state. The Royal Beastflayers were completed very early on in the project, and they helped us define the core colours and the processes we’d use to render various materials, as well as letting us set some boundaries with some of the more extreme skin tones.
We enjoyed returning to existing subfactions and finding ways to ramp up the horror feel with how we painted them! Each faction in Warhammer Age of Sigmar has a set of core themes that we always try to stick to – for the Flesh-eater Courts we felt it was important to double down on the horror aesthetic.
This meant that their four subfactions each needed to bring a unique and interesting hook that aligned with the overarching themes. The Blisterkin, for example, worship the sun, which means their pale, sickly skin has areas where it is also extremely burnt and sore. This visually communicates one of their unique hooks in a way that’s quite horrifying, which engages with their ghoulish nature.
Very early on, we decided not to represent Flesh-eater Courts as they see themselves through the delusion itself. We chose to portray what everyone else sees when a horde of crazed ghouls comes bounding down the hill at them. Before delusion impacts the enemy, they do not see vivid banners and detailed heraldry – all they see are entrails and bloody rags.
Naturally, there were instances where we could have a little bit of fun. The Crypt Guard banners and the shields of the Morbheg Knights have parodies of nobility rendered out of flesh, bone and blood. We painted markings and different skin tones on the flayed and quartered skin in a way that suggests traditional heraldry. From this, you can envision what the ghoul sees – instead of some hands nailed to a board covered with splatters of gore, it’s the intricate heraldry of their Duke.
Similarly, for Grand Justice Gorymayne, there are normal texts written on the pages of the book that he is holding, but they’re very faded, and there are markings on top that are just gory scrawls. To him, these are probably crucial amendments and footnotes, but on the miniature, it has to represent what it really is: the scrawlings of a delusional cannibal.
One of the traps we tried not to fall into was treating the skin as a uniform almost because that then goes against the whole idea that they were once humans. There might be subtle variations between different Archregent’s courts or differences between courts across the Mortal Realms, but overall it should be the same curse, and it should have a unified effect. As we’ve talked about in previous ’Eavy Metal articles, rendering materials differently can add as much identity as picking a colour, which means the Gristlegore Flesh-Eaters might take to daubing themselves with markings, whereas Hollowmourne might streak their hair and fur with blood. It’s a subtle difference but it adds areas of identity beyond just skin colour alone, so while we focused on one skin tone for each, there’s room for adding interesting beyond variations on that one skin type.
Flayed skin and gore present surprising opportunities for rendering different materials based on things like age and condition. You can look at various elements like flesh and organs, and think about their properties – this piece is dried, this is fresh, this is rotten – that they bring a range of textures you can introduce. Goremayne’s intestine wig is a good example, as it’s rendered extremely wet, with pure white highlights that convey the glistening nature of these fresh entrails. Even with blood, there's a lot of variety in tones, from dark brown dried blood that you see across the miniatures to things that are vivid and fresh, like in the Abhorrant Cardinal’s staff, which features a vampire’s freshly removed and still bloody heart. We tried to take advantage of those subtle variations across the whole range and didn’t just rest on one recipe that worked.
There are also a lot of other different elements that break up the overwhelming abundance of skin. Bone appears a lot across the range, and there are many approaches to that, from bleached to marrow-slicked, but there's also rusting armour and soiled cloth. When painting characters like the Royal Decapitator, we came across the challenge of making the metals look tarnished and rusty but still read against the brown leather, which we achieved by really pushing the edge of the blade to be brighter, like he has been sharpening it despite its dilapidated state. When you’re painting these miniatures yourself, one of the things that it might be worth remembering is that skin is often tricky because we see it all the time, so we know inherently in our subconscious what a normal skin tone looks like, so it's easier to get human skin wrong than it is to get an orruk skin tone wrong. The advantage of ghouls is that even though we paint them to have a basis in real-world flesh and blood, it’s through a filter of death, so it’s harder to get it wrong.
The sinewy, emaciated features on these miniatures take Contrast paints and Shade paints really well, you can start with a darker spray paint and then add successively light sprays over at higher angles – what we call zenithal priming – that does so much work and layering Contrast over completes it in a flash. Also, if you check out the art in the battletome, these guys are always absolutely covered in blood, which gives you a chance to go to town with Blood for the Blood God, which is always fun! You can flick it over them, splatter it on, and if you’ve painted your Flesh-eater Courts with cool, pallid tones, you also get a great contrasting colour.
There is also no freehand or fine filigree anywhere on these miniatures – you can paint crude banners and dirty metal and not have to worry too much about being incredibly neat as long as everything is coherent.
Cheers Max. You can pre-order the Flesh-eater Courts Army Set from Saturday and have it sat on your desk soon after, ready to be daubed in grime, blood and gore or Citadel Colour paints if you’re feeling slightly more refined.