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Has anyone noticed this? Maybe it's just selection bias... That is, only the best painters in Russia post on an English speaking website, but holy hell... is it coincidence or something else?

Eh, depends on the style.

For a while the French were the best, and you have some crazy good Spaniards. Then Eastern Europe showed up and yeah Russia and Poland spit out some crazy stuff.

Admittedly it's all pretty irrelevant to me because short of looking at a picture and going "hmmm, cool" the level to which some of these guys are painting is so beyond what a normal gamer would (or even could) do that it's....silly almost?

I guess for me there is definitely a finite level of time/skill that I could ever justify on what boils down to...a toy soldier. It's why my feedback on this part of the forum is far more enthusiastic for the average gamer painting a cool tabletop army and far less for the paint-brush ninjas who spent 64 hours painting a shield.

I'm with you on that, Elbows - there's only so much time and effort one could put into the whole army, having a model that epic painted would diminish everything else. Not a bad thing, but the level to which they paint these trophy models is impressive, but I just don't get the energy to do that degree.. I do tabletop standard and call it a day.

I never look at the nationality of who painted what, just good art. I just presumed that they were people with either insane skill, a lot of free time, or both.

Then again, have you seen russian soldiers dance? Dem boyz got skillz to pay the billz for dayz.

I still think france has the best painters and sculptors but those painters seemed to have moved away from GW and gaming miniatures so they dont post here alot.

Looking and sites like http://www.puttyandpaint.com/ where you can find the best painters. You find alot of french, spanish, italian and eastern european sounding names.

There are alot of good russian, but are they the best right now? No i dont think so, all of the above are so close to each other in skill.

I recall there was a fuss some years ago at a couple of the big international shows (Euro Militaire IIRC) where some Russian entries that were getting top results were team painted but being entered under a single name. The stuff is really good, but I recall that some of it wasn't the work of an individual.