Waaagh_Gonads wrote:
I

1: Who is the Empperor attacking? It certainly isn't Horus. He seems to be looking off frame and leaping in the same direction.
2: The claws were initially what threw me off, large areas of plain gold. This larger pic does have some definition/markings, but that will not appear on a book cover, being shrunk down.
3: Horus and especially his face feels very cartoony. The Emperor, face and armour seem great, but in a completely different style to Horus.
4: The black cloud in the lower half. I imagine it was done to frame the emperor, but we end up with dark grey and black in 1/3 of the picture.
5: Ships and the planet. They are good/no issues with them for me. BUT some sort of glass/force field would add more to it, and then at the bottom the stars creep into the black cloud at the bottom, rendering the hard edge provided higher pointless.

Horus is the most jarring part, he just doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the picture in the way he has been drawn/painted.

A sad end to a great series.

Compare the above to the following and I would choose the image below every time. They both convey the same information and feel, but the below image is stylistically consistent and has a gravitas/sense of depth that the new one doesn't.

Part of the problem is that in digital art colors don't really blend together (Because they aren't real physical objects) and the shades and tones aren't the same as in natural pigments. So instead of the colors blending into an almost infinite range of shades it will tend to look like huge brush strokes of photoshop layers because that's essentially what it is. It looks "flat" and the colour tones look "washed out" and bland. An artist might convince themself that this detail isn't needed and yet you can tell when it's missing. You aren't painting in a stylised way, you're doing realism with less detail, ie, worse.

The famous GW artist Adrian Smith (https://40k.gallery/artist/adrian-smith) did almost all his memorable work in inks and paints but he did produce this image in digital trying to imitate an oil painting. It's an impressive feat and on first glance looks convincing but you can see a common issue where the background doesn't look like it's connected to the foreground and seems to be composed of giant washed out photoshop tint layers. And as stated before generally the colours and hue seem "off" and bland. The filigree on the armour looks weird and watery like it was bad ai art, it may have been too detailed for his tools to be able to do properly digitally.


Compare with this famous Adrian Smith piece from when he reached the peak of his prowess in physical art.



There is immense fine detail even in the areas he left less detailed and "scribbled", no giant photoshop-like layer "brush strokes" and the colours pop despite them being illuminated pixels like the digital on our screen, his colour palette was worse because he never had to think about picking his colours out of a digital palette, he just used the physical pigments he had access to. It's just more vibrant and more memorable. There is just so much more innate detail in physical art because it's a physical object and small details are easier to include. If I have one big problem with digital art it's a lack of colours and tones, the physical art will always contain more because the colours are mixing properly whereas in digital they don't.

Now compare this to a guy who is a true master of digital artwork for GW, Lewis Jones. (https://40k.gallery/artist/lewis-jones) He is the one behind the brilliant current GS Cults, CSM and Imperial Guard codexes. They are amazing and look like the love children of a Caravaggio and a John Blache artwork.



But both the CSM and GS Cult artwork were well-cropped because when you look at them in their full form you see horrible unfinished sections around where they cropped it. Look at the muzzle flashes weird tripod daemon engine and generally everything in the upper 4th of the screen being full of ugly DeviantArt style "brush strokes".



On the Genestealer Cult cover you see a lot less of this but look at the wall of pale cultists running from the background to the foreground, they are composed of big rectangular photoshop layers, there is no depth, they are watery colour layers of one exact perfectly homogeneous hex colour and look wrong. And look at the guy in the very front of the foreground, he looks weird and wrong because he doesn't really look like he belongs with the background, (Again a common problem with digital art) he looks like he was created just like the others and then given a general darker layer over himself, probably on another layer and then cut and pasted in. As an attempt to emulate shadow it fails. There is another guy much closer to the other figures who has been treated with the same filter or layer and makes it even more jarring.This one was cropped in a way which makes this less obvious though. So even a guy who is amazing a digital art still has a lot of "DeviantArt-esque" cheapness on the edges just due to the inherent limitations of the medium, you can't leave poorly detail areas and expect them to blend in with highly detailed areas, an inherent failure of the digital medium.

Compare his excellent art, however with some generic outsourced stuff in the same codex. It's detailed but not detailed enough, things all over look wrong and cheap. He has either left this art unfinished or is unable to produce the necessary quality to be an actual replacement for physical art. More broadly I think this represents more of an illustration than true art. More and more of this is in GW products and I genuinely wonder why. All it does is produce wild dissonance between different pieces of art in the book, particularly between modern and classic works and makes Warhammer seem more cheap. GW always had a huge advantage over other fantasy games with their art being leagues ahead, it played a huge role in why GW is so successful today.