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. It is cinematically cinematic and evokes the victory of hard work or the cold blooded anger of a soldier heading to battle. The artistry displayed was amazing. It was flawless in shading, with the smooth blending of light and dark shades creamy. 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.

The awarding the Slayer Sword is just one part of 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. They set up their own lighting and palettes and shared their tips. 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.

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.

My trip to AdeptiCon showed me that I am not the only one in this pursuit. Companies like Games Workshop, Hasbro, the parent company of Wizards of the Coast are making record profits in the hobby games market. To find out why, I reached out and interviewed Ian Williams, an academic fellow at The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

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

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. Most of us find ourselves in low-quality jobs that don’t matter in the end. We are often exploited for our wages and are not paid well. 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.

There’s a lot of stuff that I think that Games Workshop does not always do well. They raise their prices. Although they don’t operate at a monopoly, it is not impossible. But one of the things that they do a really good job of is that they value the craft portion of this. It is called “The Hobby” and 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.

How does the Golden Demon specifically play into that?

When you are part of a group, you feel part of something that is social even when you are by yourself.

If you are just painting on your own, how can you tell if you are doing a great job? You can still see the finished product, even if no one is there or you don’t have any pictures. 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. You can still see it even if you don’t think you will ever be a Golden Demon artist. Just by looking at the work of master craftspeople and their awards, you are part of a larger community.

It really feels like it has this basis in a county fair or The Great British Bake Off. This is my Blue Ribbon-winning Apple Raspberry Pie, so please consider me as a Golden Demon.

I would say it isn’t different. The same thing. It’s not like Warhammer artists, looking down, see what they do as something similar to making a pie or knitting a circle or jamming out with friends on their guitars. 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. The same thing. These are the Golden Demon bakers. Master bakers.