Just spent an hour in the local Warhammer Store (not quite a full Games Workshop, this is just a small store for Warhammer.
Took the kids and the manager was absolutely brilliant. Made us feel so welcome, spent ages chatting to my boys about various armies.
Introduced them (and me) to the Battle Honours guide programme, sort of like a tutorial with tasks, stamps to earn and rewards for doing so
He also gave them some free books, a couple of free models and showed them how to paint.

Was absolutely lovely and everyone was so friendly.
Tempy, any of this your work?
If so, awesome!

Oooh, how much do you want for them?

Ultra marines. Don't have a choice! It's what it comes with.

Purple Bone. Oooo er

I'm painting models with one of my sons now. It's lovely.

I painted an Ultramarine recently. First one since starting back in the hobby eight years ago.

I don't really have any insight but basically, the 'Eavy Metal team are painters that paint box art miniatures to sell the product, they're a team in the double figures and recipes have to be replicable between them all, and future painters.

Miniatures don't take on the properties of light very well, even under extreme studio conditions, simply due to scale. Even metallic at that level don't reflect enough that an edge will be picked out of a shape. Back in the Mike McVey days I imagine they came to the decision bright colours and edge highlights sold their sculpts better than other scale modelling techniques, or more textural stuff like enamels and oil washes. Better photography has made the latter techniques more viable to the public.




There was definitely a period where 'Eavy Metal just did extreme edge highlights with no real consideration for rendering materials, different textures, and other concerns of believability or realism. If you read any of the interviews i've done with the current content lead, Max on Warhammer Community, or with any of the painters, they're pursuing believability in rendering a lot more these days, while stuff keeping that laser sharp edge highlighting.

Take these Centurions, versus the new Terminators - there's actually some more naive brushstrokes on the new Terminators compared to  the Centurions, but there's also a much greater depth to the soft shading on the panels.



Then, when the studio have the time to push things on a single miniature like the Terminator captain, that level of rendering increases substantially.



As an example, take a look at the old clarants (top) versus the new ones (bottom). Not only are the sculpts drastically better, but the way they render materials has a drastic shift from simple edge highlighting to an increased amount of rendering across different materials.
 

That was a thorough post that I found helpful, thank you.

Aye but you're still a painting Don Temps