Review: Age of Sigmar Painting Guide

The Painting Guide for Age of Sigmar is mostly what it sounds like exactly in the title. However, there is a few bits of lore takes up the front quarter of the book.

As a Painting Guide, it's no surprise that most of the pictures in the book are of the painted models. There is a little bit of actual art (mostly recycled from other sources), but for the most part we see the models of the Starter Set posed and painted by the gurus of the 'eavy Metal team.

The first 30 pages are mostly a model showcase, but does offer an interesting bit of lore. They officially name the various retinues and tribes and give a bit of information about them. For the Eternals, we can gleam the name of each Prime, as each retinue is named after him. For the Goretide we learn the name of two tribes of Bloodreavers and the name of the character units. This isn't a huge lore dump, isn't necessary to enrich the game as a whole, but I think it's a nice touch. Lore hounds like myself learn something new about the starter set models, even if it's not much.

The rest of the book is the actual painting guide. You get several close up photos of various parts of every model unit as well as which paint to use, layer by layer. You can paint every model in your starter set using this guide as all the parts of each model are detailed and every paint you need to use is there.

The one complain I have is that it doesn't provide any basic techniques for painting. If Age of Sigmar is your first foray into model building and painting, this won't guide you through basics. While the first White Dwarf covered some very basic model building, the opportunity is missing here. It tells you to wash and drybrush and highlight without explaining how to do that, it doesn't talk about thinning paints or using a palette or any thing basic like that. These are covered very well in the GW YouTube videos on how to paint models, but really should be included here as well.

Otherwise, this is a decent book that will give you a good reference to how to paint the Age of Sigmar Starter Set models the "official" colors. While it lacks some basic details, it provides plenty of close up shots to help you get your coloring right. There's a smidge of lore in there as well, so if you're a hardcore lore fan, it has something, but nothing substantial. It's by no means a required book, barely even an optional book, but it delivers mostly on what it says it will do.