How to Paint Jaghatai Khan Primarch of the White Scars.
How to Paint Jaghatai Khan. What a bittersweet moment this is. The last of the Primarch series is here, Jaghatai Khan, lord of the White Scars. I make no bones about my love of the Horus Heresy series. It was a new art style, with super detailed, realistic sculpts. The Forge World studio cut to the heart of everything I loved about the Warhammer Universe. The complexity of the storytelling, with the visceral, sculpts and painting style was a new take on the hobby that I threw myself into.
The Heresy was also a breeding ground for artists. It was a community centered around the representation of your force as seen on the battlefield. At its best, it was a community that really cared about painting and modeling as a craft to develop. At its worst, it became a community of rivet counters and gatekeepers.
white scar tutorials
The Heresy, at the time of writing, isn’t in a great place. Engagement is flatlining, with little in the way of support when compared to the other major lines GW produces. Age of Sigmar, 40K, and the Specialist Games have overwhelmed what was once the most prosperous part of the company.
At the time of writing – 1st of Feb 2022 – my hope is that I will look back on these words and see that the Khan was the last of the first round of Primarchs. The last of the Heresy era before it took off with a new boxed set, rules, and impetuous.
But enough preamble, what can we say about this model?
Well, it’s rather good. For a sculpt so clustered with detail, it hangs together surprisingly well. I talk about the importance of negative space in the Khan’s introduction (video series linked below) for a miniature painter. While there is little enough of that here, the detail doesn’t feel overbearing.
On the whole, I did like the colour choices chosen by the studio paint job. However, I did want to mute elements and introduce textures. The gloves are a great example to highlight.
The gloves on the official artwork are saturated red. I wanted the leather to have a red element, but not draw attention away from other elements of the piece. The face and red scar are more prominent because of how muted the red leather gloves are.
The skin tone – always a subject I approach tentatively being a middle-class, middle-aged white dude. I always feel like I’m walking on egg shells with this topic, and we had a nice discussion on this subject during the Sunday Social Live Stream YouTube channel. If you would like to know the next time we go live please subscribe to the channel and help paint some miniatures alongside me.
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