In our Army Showcase series, Goonhammer contributors take a look at the armies we’ve been collecting for years, and the new ones we’ve just finished – what drew us to them, why we keep building and painting, and how they play on the table. This week Lenoon, shamed by SRM’s fantastic article about his Eire Rangers, talks about the Iron Sultanate
The Painter: Aaron “Lenoon” Bowen
The Game:Â Trench Crusade
Ducats: the whole lot
Collecting Since: April 2025
Instagram: lenoonsbread
Like a lot of people, I thought Trench Crusade looked absolutely fucking amazing. I backed it for the rulebook, with the expectation that it would one day arrive, look very pretty, I’d periodically flip through it and look at the pictures, read the background and think “man I wish I could draw like this”. It was, 100%, the art that drew me in. It’s exactly my kind of grimdark, just absolute nonsense twirled up to eleven layered on top of Catholocism. It shares a lot of design DNA with what I tried to do with my Knight Army, taking elements of Catholocism to their absolute logical conclusion. The best idea in it, I thought, before I’d read all the background that was available during the Kickstarter, was the meta-christs. I bloody love that idea. It’s so solid.
Then I read the background and the stuff I thought was inititally the most interesting turned out to be the least. The Pilgrims and New Antioch are pretty cool, but what caught my imagination was the Paradise of the Faithful, the Citadel of the Wall – the Iron Sultanate. There’s not a lot of Scifi Islam out there, and this was an interesting departure from the norm. It isn’t just that an Islamic faction should exist in a game rooted in the Crusades, but that it’s something a bit different – the extension of the Golden Age of Islamic art, philosophy and science, the unquestionably highest-tech faction with the weirdest stuff, fighting the long war against demons unleashed by the West. There’s a lot there to like, so it wasn’t much of a question that I’d start off here.
Painting
I’ll skip over the “getting the models bit” briefly, because I asked Goonhammer Contributor Sero to print me off everything made so far, received them (and very nice prints they are too) and stuck them on bases. That was done. I kitbashed one Azeb out of Wargames Atlantic bits essentially to show that I could, then I started painting. Normally.
I got bored almost immediately. There was something about Trench Crusade, particularly hanging on the discord and seeing what people were putting on facebook that put me off painting these guys “normally”. Base coat, layer, shade, wash, highlight. I couldn’t be bothered. I paint everything like this, but it didn’t seem like a good fit. I looked at grimdark tutorials, read everything that Goonhammer’s master of Blanchitsu, Skails, put out and realised I try and paint like that quite often. That wouldn’t fit either. I wanted something weird, different, unique – just like Trench Crusade.
I picked up my wife’s Art History books to look at other techniques and ways of painting I could adopt. They’re quite old books now – bought for uni back in the 00s – and were pretty limited on their Islamic art sections. While I’d love to learn how to do ceramics or metalwork, it wasn’t going to work for the models. Instead, I flicked through oil painting techniques until I found one I wanted to try – Impasto.
Impasto isn’t a Crusades era technique. It’s all about thick, thick paint – painted or scraped onto canvas in a manner where brush strokes are highly visible, texture does some of the work usually done by tone and colour and the paint itself becomes three dimensional. There’s a lot of conflict with how miniatures painting tends to work there (thin your paints! Don’t show brush strokes! The Miniature is already 3D!), but I’ve recently been obsessed with the intentionality of what we do as painters – I want to see what you wanted to do, not what you could. Impasto it was.
Early Trials
It took a while to break out of the usual way of painting. I dug out an ancient set of oil paints (Windsor and Newtons probably bought in 2003-4) and tried it out on the Communicant and Observer. The Communicant was first, and I applied the oils essentially as I would acrylics at first, before adding more texture with a cocktail stick to the skin. It felt good, so I was a bit bolder with the armour plating, leaving brush strokes very visible and doing all my colour mixing on the model. The armour here is entirely emerald green and white, applied in quick layers.
So far so alright. The Communicant was a step into Impasto territory, completely abandoning my usual style of painting to create a thick texture on the cloak (which I think has come out looking like human skin – nice!) and nearly obscuring the armour with texture. I realised here that you could apply the same techniques to the base, which is simply some scrap card with thick oils over it.
I felt pretty proud of this and stuck it on the Trench Crusade facebook page. I did not expect the reactions – incredibly polarised! It ended up about 50:50 between “I absolutely fucking hate this” and “I love it”. Something about breaking the boundaries of what we’re supposed to do with models seemed to flip a switch for people, either into abject hate or fairly effusive praise. My key learning from these test models was that going maximalist thick over the whole model wouldn’t work – the Observer’s chain mail is just a black wash over gunmetal. I took that forward into the Sultanate scheme, where flat metal or acrylic painted skin helps to break up the chaos.
The Iron Sultanate
After reading more about what lists were available to the Iron Sultanate, I landed on the Alchemists. I love the idea of these mad-or-divinely-inspired poet-scientists cracking away on ever greater and more bizarre takwin monstrosities, using the mythology of Islam and Mesopotamia to create living weapons against the forces of hell. Plus, there’s flamethrowers and that’s always fun.
I developed red and brass as the main colour scheme through trial and error (several poor discarded azebs and Janissaries), with Blue as a hard spot colour contrast. I think it’s worked well in some cases (Azebs) and poorly in others (the Bull). I spent about a day pushing paint around a piece of plasticard to work out how these colours could (and shouldnt) mix, and where the sharpest contrast would be – massive thanks to Snafu for showing me the “take a picture in black and white” technique to explore this – which led to really harsh shadows, working in neat black into nooks and crannies.
I thought the Lions of Jabir, particularly, would suit this new, horrible style and don’t they just? The lions are my favourite part of the army, painted with a real reckless abandon in the thickest, most horribly flesh coloured mixes I could create, with the undersides painted with thick black straight out the tube, working in the slightest bit of colour to create these leering, looming monstrosities. Slapping paint on with the tools I use for greenstuff and miliput instead of a brush and building up ever thicker layers seemed very appropriate – my own version of mad alchemical science. Keeping the metal to standard acrylic painting provides a horrible contrast between the unliving and the shouldnt-be-alive in a way that I find very satisfying.
With those done and drying, work started on the Bull in a very similar process. With no notes made about colour combinations, it’s ended up a lot pinker, a bit like raw beef, and with obviously painful points where metal meets flesh. I struggled with the sword and gun, attempting some kind of oil based NMM until I abandoned it altogether and just stuck U-Rust on there. Not my best move, but what’s done is done.
I felt pretty confident at this point, but the infantry were very difficult. I lost a few models to trial paint schemes, the oils so thick on them that it was easier to chuck the whole thing rather than try to salvage it under millimeters of paint. In the end, I painted them entirely using cocktail sticks, placing vast globs of oils on them then poking the paint until it stayed where I wanted it. Faces were a particular struggle – both the Azebs took a long time to get right, but in the end they’ve captured a particular look, frozen but in movement, almost blurred, and I think they’ve come out well.
The Alchemist, and leader of the warband, needed something a bit special. The Islamic art=ceramics focus of the art history books came back in here, and I thought of trying ceramic armour. It’s very simple – thick (and I mean thick) light blue paint with white worked into it with a cocktail stick. Taking advice from the Goonhammer discord (a lovely bunch, join our patreon and get stuck into it), I delineated armour panels with fine gold and black lines to pick out some of the detail that would otherwise have been lost under texture.
The Future
I’m by no means great at this, but for an experiment I think they’ve come out well. There are no real plans to expand, or add anything more to the warband unless I find a second alchemist model I really like the look of. I don’t know if I’d paint like this again. I think it works, but it might only work within the context of Trench Crusade – it might not even work there. It was a very interesting experiment in deliberately breaking the rules of miniature painting, and I think taught me quite a bit about what works and what doesn’t work in terms of texture, contrast and colour. If they don’t get expanded out from here they’ll go in a nice display case and be a testament to trying something new.
If I can get the time to actually play Trench Crusade more than occasionally (my only game was a resounding defeat, the Bull instantly killed) there’ll be some more to add – and I’ll pick up the oils and the cocktail sticks again to get back into an impasto world.
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