Xeno Philosophy : the beauty of 40k aliens

Something like 15 years ago I was googling stuff like "cool music" and "badass song" (I was a cool kid). The only video I really remember from that deep research effort was an AMV combining the corniest metal song of all time (possibly Manowar ? that checks out for the garbage I liked back then) with a Dawn of War cutscene featuring an Eldar Banshee. I was most definitely the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life. Many years later I got into painting minis and picked up some space elves. Time went by, I fell down the indie rabbit hole and bounced off the local 40k community pretty hard, leading me to sell the majority of these first minis. For some absurd reason, the recent announcement of a new Dawn of War sequel brought up my memories of watching that old edit on the family computer, and I found myself thinking about space elves again.

If the Imperium is a sort of cautionary tale about the darkness underlying our societies in the developed world, the Xenos tend to be free to foster much more out there visual and narrative ideas. This comes across beautifully in my memory of that Dawn of War cutscene. The character's armor being made of this organic bone texture is so strange and memorable, it singlehandedly got me fascinated by the universe. And of course, none of the GW eldar minis actually use that design language, this is part of what we're adressing today.

I have multiple Xenos projects cooking. The Genestealers you've seen here, my Necron army, and a little T'au force are all being slowly being worked on. I find all of these projects exciting because they exist away from the dominant image of what 40k is. In that space, they offer a way to explore radical otherness, to model truly alien ideas

 

This model is still a work in progress. It will most likely be employed as a spiritseer leading a pack of wraiths. You can see I went about as far as I could from the base model (a dork in robes on a 25mm), leaning into a more bizarre look for the wraith constructs. The Genestealer models I've been posting are a way to tackle a sort of anxiety about my own body, but so is the spirit seer. It's just a more tender look, less disgust for the flesh, more kindness for the creaky joints and the improper assemblies.

 

A while back, an anonymous caller asked me how model makers were designing clothes for the post
apocalyptic settings of our dark little games. A few people's work came to mind, but I wasn't quite sure what to answer. I guess a lot of minis wear robes ? In general clothing seemed to me largely dictated by the base kits, and thus the future's fashion was mostly made of medieval armor sculpted by the Perry brothers. Still reflecting on clothing and now in the midst of sculpting some eldar weirdos, I stumbled upon some of Bat_Abattoir's work showing his middle eastern admech army. The perspective of sculpting these kinds of volumes was appealing but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it conceptually as well. The texture work previously shown served to make the elves more alien, while giving them human clothing would pull in the opposite direction. And if that anchor to humanity was clearly middle eastern, to me, that felt like a bit of a statement. It reminds me of something Alan Moore pulls in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where martians are pretty much just normal people drawn by Kevin O'Neil in beautiful costumes inspired by early 20th century Arabic clothes. Add to that the fact that they first appeared in the book in september 2002, in a story about the British government deploying biological weapons no less and you should get the picture.

These guardians are a result of that question. Same as the previous model, all of these are in progress. 

The first one here is where I went tried the bone texture mentioned at the start. The clothing style here is absolutely riffing on the Lawrence of Arabia/Kevin O'Neil look. There's some really simple reposing going on here an throughout the other minis in this squad, mostly because the new guardians love doing splits and overspilling out of their bases, and that doesn't fly in this house.

 

The next couple are another spin on the same look, using a medieval Arab helmet as inspiration for the first, and some traditional Tuareg clothing for the second.

Final model for today is based on this photo I found while searching for references of Palestinian clothing. The head covering is quite unique and combined with the jewelry hanging bellow the chin, it frames the face in quite an interesting way. I really look forward to painting these, because I think the patterns on the clothing I've taken inspiration from will be quite fun to riff on. I plan on making a squad of wraithguard and a couple characters for this project, might even fuck around and get a tank in there.

 

Anyway I'll see you next time, free Palestine.