Photo essay: Warhammer’s biggest painting competition in three years

In late March, fans from around the world came together in northern Illinois for the 2022 Golden Demon, the world’s biggest Warhammer painting competition. It was the first Golden Demon held in nearly three years, and the first to be held in the United States in more than a decade.

The competition took place at AdeptiCon, one of the largest and longest-running wargaming conventions in the country. More than 500 different pieces were entered into the open competition, representing a backlog of models that simply haven’t been seen in public since the start of the pandemic.

In a crowded field of towering mechs and elaborate dioramas, the top-winning model was a single miniature of a lizardman that stood barely one-inch tall. The sculpt itself is cinematic, evoking the triumph of a hard-won victory or the cold-blooded rage of a warrior heading into battle. But the artistry on display was impressive. The shading on that little skink was immaculate, the blending of the light highlights into the dark shadows creamy, consistent, and smooth. Judges called it “literally perfect,” and it’s hard to disagree. The standing-room-only crowd on hand gave its painter, Gavin Garza, a thunderous round of applause.

A blue skink raises a spear overhead, an unseen light glinting from its obsidian blade. — The grand prize-winning model at the Golden Demon, a tiny blue beasty barely one inch tall.

Of course, the awarding of the Slayer Sword was just one small part of the five-day gaming festival. AdeptiCon included multiple tournaments and demos from Games Workshop, as well as companies like Atomic Mass Games, Corvus Belli, and Para Bellum.

But at the center of it all was a studious cohort of amateur and professional miniature painters doing their thing. Each one set up shop in public spaces, unfolded their custom lighting, wet down their palettes, and got to work — all while sharing tips and tricks. Visitors could easily spend all their time in the classrooms nearby, learning challenging techniques like wet-blending, glazing, and weathering from some of the best miniature painters in the world.

Dozens of painters at work in the painter’s lounge at AdeptiCon 2022.

YouTuber Lyla Mev at work during AdeptiCon 2022.

A painters studies a green bust mounted on a wooden handle.

I’ve spent many hours over the last few years painting miniatures. It’s become an everyday ritual for me, an extremely satisfying way to spend my down time after looking at computer screens for a living. It feels good to slow down, pick up a beautiful figure, and then spend a few hours practicing.

A Space Marine in yellow, his armor marred by battle.

A White Scars Space Marine with a falcon stands atop a rocky crag.

A Sister of Battle, resplendent with wings spread and doves in flight.

My trip to AdeptiCon proved without a doubt that I’m hardly alone in that pursuit. The hobby games industry is booming, with companies like Games Workshop and Hasbro (the parent company of Wizards of the Coast) pulling in record profits. More people are picking up a paintbrush every day, and I reached out to academic Ian Williams, a teaching fellow at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a big Warhammer hobby fan, to find out why.

What follows is just a portion of our conversation, lightly edited for brevity and clarity, alongside some images I captured around the show.

A purple-clad sorceress holds up a magical device.

A troll, covered in giant mushrooms, pulls a beast out of the swampy earth.

Polygon: Ian, we probably couldn’t get this many people in one room to do watercolors of birds, but you put the demon god Khorne on a plinth in front of them and they’re all about it. What have you learned from studying the community that surrounds the art and craft of miniature painting?

Ian Williams: There’s this guy, Richard Sennett who’s a theorist, and he writes this book called The Craftsman where he’s trying to figure this question out. What is craft? Why do people craft? His answer is actually pretty simple: Craft is the act of doing a good job for its own sake.

There’s something about us that we want to do a good job at things. The trick is that most of us are stuck in shitty jobs where the quality of our work doesn’t really matter; where we are exploited in terms of wages; where we just don’t get paid very much. Why would you work hard under those circumstances? Or maybe you work a job in the classical, industrial mode of working where you don’t actually see what it is that you’re making in the first place. You can take pride in your work at putting a steering wheel on a car in your 1940s Ford factory, but you’re detached from the final product. It’s classical Marxist alienation.

A grot tank, no more than a few inches tall, covered in freehand designs.

There’s a lot of stuff that I think that Games Workshop does not always do well. They raise their prices. They’re not operating at a monopoly level, but it’s not too far off. But one of the things that they do a really good job of is that they value the craft portion of this. They call it “The Hobby.” They capitalize it.

Now, that’s all a means of kind of enclosing this impulse in this corporate machinery. But I’ve also known enough people over the years at Games Workshop — I used to work at a Games Workshop store — to know that they value the craft side of things in a way that I don’t know that too many gaming companies do, either inside or outside the wargaming space. I think that they do a good job of tapping into that impulse, in a way a lot of other companies don’t.

A diorama of Adepta Sororitas fighting in gothic ruins.

Spirits covered in rags wield golden scythes.

Freehand work covers the shell of a purple mech.

How does the Golden Demon specifically play into that?

When you’re part of a craft you’re always part of something social, even when you’re by yourself.

If you’re just painting by yourself, how do you know you’re doing a good job? Even if nobody else is around or you don’t have the pictures, you have this idea, which is socially constructed, of what a good miniature looks like: Because it was made by someone else. Or you watched a how-to guide. Or something like that.

So Golden Demon kind of serves as the pinnacle of the craft. It’s something to aspire to, it’s something to get ideas from, and it’s something that you’re participating in by viewing. Even if you know that you’re never going to become a Golden Demon painter, you still watch it, knowing that you’re never gonna do that. You’re participating in this larger community just by the act of viewing and paying attention to the awards and the output of these master craftspeople.

An imperial fighter, just a few inches wide, passes over a delicately shaded backdrop.

A winged medusa-like creature casts a fiery spell.

It really feels like it has this basis in a county fair or The Great British Bake Off. Here’s my blue ribbon-winning apple raspberry pie, please consider me for the Golden Demon.

I would go so far as to say that it’s not different. It’s exactly the same thing. I don’t think that too many Warhammer painters, head-down, think of what they do as they do as akin to baking a pie, or whittling, or starting a knitting circle, or getting together and jamming with their friends on the guitar. But it’s exactly the same thing.

We all have that thing that just kind of piques our interest, and that’s the thing that we want to do a good job on. It’s exactly the same. They’re bakers, the Golden Demon guys. Master bakers.

Some object source lighting (OSL) on display from James Wappel. Note the non-metallic metal effect on the helmet as well.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Anthony Wang and Lyla Mev show off their technique, painting miniatures for the AdeptiCon charity raffle.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
This large-scale model can fit a 28 mm-tall Space Marine inside the cockpit.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Most gaming competitions, let alone painting competitions, require at least three colors of paint be applied to each model. This extraordinary piece was likely done with a Sharpie.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Many fans who showed up to play in the Warhammer: Age of Sigmar tournament created elaborate display bases to transport their armies.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
The Star Wars: Legion community was out in force, playing across dozens of elaborate tables like this one. The landing lights on Kylo Ren’s shuttle here actually work.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
On the vendor floor, Artis Opus was on hand to show its unique set of drybrushing tools at work.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Some of the effects possible with Artis Opus brushes.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Marvel: Crisis Protocol from Atomic Mass Games.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Halo: Ground Command, while out of print, still has a dedicated following. Fans gathered to show off the results of their efforts at 3D printing new miniatures.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
New miniatures games, like Lunar from Black Site Studios, features plenty of classy paint jobs.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
Old-school Napoleanics were out in force, including this column of Prussians marching off to war.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon
A massive army for A Song of Ice and Fire: Tabletop Miniatures Game from CMON.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon