Category Archives: Fan Art

Fan Art, Science Fiction, Sketchbook pages

More of my Underhive sketchbook

May 22, 2017 Will Beck Leave a comment

I’m in the middle of moving house at the moment so I haven’t had much time to add images to my website. In a break from frantically packing I’ve uploaded some more of my Necromunda sketchbook as I promised. The next pages are me working how to make the Necromunda Enforcers have a more hive world look but still keep the Adeptus Arbites/Judge Dredd feel to them. The quilted jacket was a medieval reference from Jes Goodwin’s early Arbites drawings (from White Dwarf 130, way back in October 1990!).

The next page has some refinements of the Necromunda Enforcer design taking elements from John Blanche’s Inquisitor Sketchbook with his slightly Fifth Element inspired Arbites. ((Wikipedia entry for The Fifth Element) (IMDb entry for The Fifth Element)). On the opposite page there are some early plans for the Scavvy gang member portrait.

The next pages are me working out the hairstyle and scene for the Scavvy and a pose for the Ratskin too. Ratskins are rumoured to be descendants of the original colonists of Necromunda who have adapted their existence over the millenia to make use of the utterly polluted hyper-populated world.

I’m still not sure the Scavvy is scary or mutated enough on the next page but I’m refining the look of the Ratskin portrait.

And the last pages for today are a sketch of a Pit Slave woman, some tracked feet for the boss Pit Slave, a sketch of an 28mm Inquisitor conversion, a floating fat Daemonhost (more of him later!) and some ideas for what would become my Scavvy portrait.

As always with my Games Workshop sketches they’re fan art and not intended to breach copyright.

More Underhive sketchbook pages

April 27, 2017 Will Beck Leave a comment

These next pages are me working on the hulking Goliath ganger, followed by some early Outlander sketches. I was wondering which of the Spyrer classes to portray and also working on the Redemptionist Deacon, a deliberate homage to Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill Nemesis The Warlock’s arch-foe Torquemada (and his Terminators). (Wikipedia entry for Nemesis the Warlock)

Here’s how I took a self-portrait photo (on the left!) and used it as reference for the crazed mutant preacher who wanders the lower levels of the Underhive. I didn’t just paint over it, I like to draw from it rather than ‘tracing’.

On these pages I was considering a BioShock Big Daddy look for the Pit Slave image, there are some doodles of Necromunda scenery too. (Wikipedia entry for Big Daddy)

Some more outlander sketches and an entire Pit Slave gang, including a robo-gimp(I don’t want to know if this is a ‘thing’) a Ned Kelly axe head chap, various cyborgs and a creepy tech to repair them.

All of this is fan art. More very soon.

Underhive sketchbook pages

April 26, 2017 Will Beck Leave a comment

As promised here are some more of my sketchbook pages. These are a selection of pages from my Necromunda Sketchbook from 2008 (it’s 120mm 148mm, so smaller than my usual A5 one). I really like to look at other people’s sketchbooks and the one’s I had of mine when I was at the Hysterical Games Stand at Salute this year really got visitors interested in the miniatures.

This got me thinking ‘What’s a project I got really into?’ Well there are a few ongoing ones but the Necromunda Underhive one was a real labour of love for me and as I’d scanned in the sketchbooks a while back I would just need to arrange them into the order I had drawn them and upload them here.

It’s no coincidence that Necromunda was a really popular game; it required just the box with its rules, plastic miniatures, multi-levelled plastic and cardboard buildings inside and was a fairly simple, easy to learn ruleset which encouraged campaign play as part of the game itself. (Wikipedia entry for Necromunda)

In fact it’s still going strong online and Games Workshop have very belatedly cottoned on to this by dipping their toes in the water with their Shadow War:Armageddon game.

I was asked by Major Gilbear (not his real name, he’s a character from Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts series (Wikipedia entry for Gaunt’s Ghosts) by to produce a banner for the Underhive forum website (this site is now defunct though YakTribe Gaming are still using many of these images. Yak Tribe gaming site)

These first eight pages depict my initial ideas for the Underhive Houses of Hive Primus on the Hive World of Necromunda. I looked at as much of the original artwork from White Dwarf magazine, the game itself, it’s precursor Confrontation, the miniatures for inspiration and also threw some of my own ideas into the mix.

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Fan Art, Fantasy, Sketchbook pages

Some unseen sketches

June 19, 2016 Will Beck Leave a comment

I’ve got loads of commissions on the go at the moment but as they’re all for unreleased projects I haven’t posted any images of them until the miniatures or games are available. Despite all that when I’ve had a spare moment I’ve still been doodling away in my sketchbook and the next few posts will be these.

A quick warning, the next few paragraphs are all about Games Workshop’s Warhammer game, so please ignore it if you’re not into that kind of thing and do skip down to the drawings!

OK, here are some of my thoughts on Games Workshop and Age of Sigmar, though bear in mind that I haven’t played it, so this isn’t related to the game play, just me looking at the aesthetic of the miniatures, artwork and whatever the new world is called (The Mortal Realms?). Last year Games Workshop decided to ‘murder their darling’ by destroying their entire Warhammer World and the last 30 years of creative output with The End Times and by releasing Warhammer – Age of Sigmar (with round bases being hastily added to peoples’ miniature armies all previously cleverly designed to rank up in units on square bases).

Now I leave it up to others to discuss the commercial wisdom of this but creatively this seems daft at best. Despite Games Workshop’s deliberate artistic policy of going for the Northern European more realistic and gritty, gothic look with the Warhammer World (rooted in part on the writers, sculptors and artists having extensive knowledge of history and the Northern Renaissance) the new Age of Sigmar seems to be going for a more Catholic, Southern European, almost high-fantasy look completely at odds with their previous artistic style and seemingly influenced by Blizzard computer games (which had ripped Games Workshop’s art off to start with!) They could easily have created an epic Heroic game system, with stripped down rules and focus on quick fun battles without resorting to wiping the Warhammer World out entirely (and letting other manufacturers take over where they left off).

OK, rambling a bit there but I thought about how I got into this stuff as a kid and it was through Warhammer Fantasy Role Play (1st edition, with rulebooks, lots of different dice and no cards!) so I drew some ideas for an Age of Sigmar role-playing party:

Here I have a sort of priest dude with the top half of a Stormcast Eternal mask, a barbaric Chaos-creature hunter, a Wood Elf Undead hunter, a non-European(!) knife-wielding woman and an ex-Empire mercenary too.
There’s a sketch of a fish-man and my vaguely Arabic masked warrior from my Sunken World poster.

The next page is continuing these characters (I was thinking there was more of the Old Warhammer World remaining than just the name Sigmar and Khorne) so I expanded on the barbarian chap fighting Chaos to a Priest of Ulric, continued with the Empire lady mercenary with a beastman skull on her hat. The former Priest of Morr is carrying bones and urns from the Warhammer World to summon the angry spirits of the fallen to wreak vengeance. After seeing the new Warhammer Quest game I think Games Workshop are trying to get some more character back into their flagship Fantasy game.