Army Showcase: Oscar's Non-Metallic Metal Stormcast Eternals Army

Today I have an absolute treat of another army showcase: Oscar Lars Knutsson’s beautiful non-metallic metal (NMM) Stormcast Eternals army. NMM is a technique you see on display pieces but Oscar has applied it to an entire army! Now if you are going to Gencon this weekend, you could be lucky enough to see Oscar’s army in the flesh, but if not, check out his website, Instagram and Twitter feeds for all his amazing pictures and commission painting. Oscar even did a handy tutorial video!

For more great Age of Sigmar armies, check out the other showcase posts. And remember that the site is now partnered with Dark Fantastic Mills, producers and purveyors of amazing 3D printed terrain and you can use the code “aos shorts” to get 10% off. The terrain is super light so shipping worldwide is surprisingly cheap. With that said, I’ll hand over to Oscar to talk a little about his army.

Oscar Lars Stormcast Eternals NMM

When Age of Sigmar first came out, I was not hot for the Stormcast Eternals. Warriors who saves the day with nothing more to them than a full servitude for Sigmar and hate for Chaos. It felt lackluster to me, and I turned my attention elsewhere. I started playing Ironjawz as their lore, style of play, and models were superior to any other faction I saw.

When GW began revitalizing their lore through the Malign Portents short stories I began seeing new light regarding the forces of Sigmar’s Finest. They aren’t actually ‘good’, and they certainly had more depth now. The process of dying, being reforged, dying again, had a much greater cost than first anticipated. It truly filled a much needed void and a desire for such a force began to grow.

Another aspect of what drove me to Stormcast Eternals was their capability of displaying a clean and sharp aesthetic. By this time I had just celebrated my first full decade as a commission painter and never really dipped my toe into Non Metallic Metal. It is such a cool technique and as a recent graduate of a five year art degree, I decided the time was right. Additionally, I am not a single model painter, but an army-painter, so the project had to be something bigger than I’d seen anybody do before. But I couldn’t paint each individual model to be a perfect ten as it would simply take too long.

I had to create a style of Non Metallic Metal that was advanced enough to convey its concept, but quick enough to be able to paint an army in roughly six months. It took me a significant amount of time to generate a process that I felt happy with. The research process consisted of studying Ben Comets (Painting Buddah), Riccardo Frizzoni, and Alex Borodenkov, the later being very helpful responding to my questions on Instagram as well as generating a color palette that would be under 10 colors. It really came down to taking a color here, one color there, a certain way of placing the light on certain objects, etc to create my own version of the technique. I didn’t even keep my initial style of painting all the way through. It developed during the project. So if looking close, one can see a difference between my liberators and Paladins in comparison to the later models like the Judicators and Celestial Ballista. It is something that doesn’t really bother me, personally.

This is also what’s so fantastic about army painting; A tough beginning to push through means I will improve. It’s such a rewarding process that shows clear progression. It also helps to strengthen very important character traits such as discipline and patience. The biggest reward is here now that I can finally put them on the table and play a full 2000pts game against some fun opponents.

My list for GenCon is a bit of a mixup. It truly was a blessing and a curse they released the Sacrosanct Chamber when they did. It’s awesome the models came out early enough for me to include some, but that also mean I could only have a handful of them ready for the conventions. It goes as follows:

Hammers of Sigmar Stormhost

Heroes:

Celestant Prime

Knight Incantor

Vandus Hammerhand

Gavriella Sureheart

Lord Relictor

Battleline:

X5 Liberators

X5 Judicators

Artillery:

Celestial Ballista

Other Units:

X5 Decimators

X5 Protectors

Endless Spells:

Everblazing Comet

Prismatic Palisade

X1 extra Command Point

So what is next? Well, I’ve had my eyes on Aventis Firestrike ever since he emerged on Twitter “leaks” from Games Day. I’ll be sure to pick him up. I may also get some Evocators riding the Celestial Dracolines. Those models are just simply amazing. In addition, I already have Astreia Solbright primed and ready to go, and she would definitely lead the pack, either as herself or a regular Lord Arcanum on Celestial Dracoline. However, most exciting is my next army project that is already… “cooking…” But you have to wait a while to find out what it is.

Lastly, I’d like to thank everyone who’s supported me and this project on TGA, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. A special thanks to Jonatan Englund and the Honest Wargamer crew (check out their podcast and live Twitter streams if you haven’t).