Thoughts on the Adeptus Mechanicus
The new minis doing the rounds are phenomenal pieces of work and art. Let’s look a bit closer:
By now you’ve all seen the shots pretty much everywhere of the main new Adeptus Mechanicus kits: I have to say that the design studio has hit this out of the park. Just take a look at these:
EVERY ONE of these designs are just amazing. The mixing of the 40K grimdark aesthetic with the crazed madmen contraptions you would expect of the Mechanicus has been done exceedingly well.
From a design point of view, the walkers look like any number of John Blanche drawings pulled right off the page and into 3d reality. From the oddly ungainly proportions, to the subtle Imperial German WW1 design cues, to the Terry Gilliam/Caro techno-madness of that creepy “driver servitor” down low looking through his magnifiers – its a complete artistic vision made real. In the case of the Skitarii infantry, you get the combination of the gears and mechanical motifs melded with obvious Roman Legionary , and again WW1 infantry design cues. You can see a lot of the Forgeworld Solar Auxllia design in these guys. These designs look like they could have walked right out of the pages of Heavy Metal magazine in the 1990s.
John Blanche
Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet – City of Lost Children
Terry Gilliam – 12 Monkeys
What is most appealing to me about this range so far is GW has not only made the Adeptus Mechanicus its own distinctive range with an aesthetic wholly it’s own, but there are enough design cues that tie into the other Imperial ranges to have it all make sense. If for example you take some of these infantry and compare them to Solar Auxillia, or take either of those walkers and compare them to an IG Sentinel, you can see how the Mechanicus makes all this common run of the mill stuff for everyone in the Imperium – but keeps the really cool exotic stuff for themselves.
That’s an easy concept to put down on paper, but to pull it off with models is a real labor of love.
It’s times like this when the words of Chairmen Kirby about GW striving to make the highest quality of tabletop miniatures in the world ring true.
BRAVO GW!
