If you like grimdark art, gnarly converted miniatures, and the Inq28 aesthetic, then you owe it to yourself to follow miniature conversion artist Sasha on Bluesky. Sasha specializes in expressionistic minis with a weathered finish and stark, desaturated palettes, tying together familiar grimdark sources like Warhammer 40,000 and Trench Crusade with disparate contemporary gothic art such as the anime Blame! and videogame Nier Automata - and throughout December, you can order Sasha's originals for 40% off in their KoFi store.
Sasha is clearly a student of the Inq28 school of painting miniatures, particularly the expressionist tendency. Similar to how painters can use larger brushes and thicker paint to communicate via the physicality of the medium rather than just the curated placement of pigment, Sasha's style often sacrifices fine detail in favor of immediate, emotive abstraction.
The result is a mini style that finds the shared brutality between a Genestealer and a mech like Metal Gear. Bodies are indeterminate, lumpen, faces caught between expressions - like a world seen through a dust storm or smeared through a photograph in low light conditions. You can find all of their currently available custom minis on KoFi, and get a 40% discount by using the code CLEARANCE, and simply follow them on Bluesky to see their new creations.
Sasha's conversions include some recognisable staples for existing wargames: models like a New Antioch Warband and a Warwolf for Trench Crusade, or Imperial Assassins and Purestrain Genestealers for Warhammer 40,000. If you're interested in ordering something purely as a display piece, you'll find a distinctly unusual sample of mechs.
Though Sasha's mechs are frequently created by raiding Gunpla kits, they're rendered with the same grimdark style as the rest of the collection. This undercuts the heroic elegance of the original designs and brings out their brutality as war machines, with many figures converted to fit into cyberpunk dystopias like Robocop or Signalis, or posthuman apocalypses like Blame! and Nier Automata.
It's a theme that could definitely be explored more in the Inq28 scene: Magos Buer's Gelida The Frozen Waste project went hard on it, and the videogame The Forever Winter is a great example of just how grimdark and gritty a mech can be, particularly as a context against which to measure distinctly squishy humans.
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