Category Archives: Illustrations

Artwork and illustrations by Will Beck.

Daemonhost and Underhive sketches

This packing and throwing away is taking much longer than I’d thought. Flippin’eck! I’ve tonnes of stuff acquired over the last decade and a half.
OK back to my old sketches; following on from the previous post here’s a page of Daemonhosts.
Here I’ve deliberately avoided Brian Nelson’s amazing Cherubael sculpt with his twisted scrawny look. The bloated floating creature perhaps is possessed by a Nurgle daemon, I’ve provided the radical Inquisitor who’s using him a vortex bomb collar in case he gets out of hand! Not sure quite when I did them, probably before the Necromunda sketchbook, entirely in inks and acrylics with no digital jiggery-pokery.

Back to Necromunda for these portrait sketches, me refining the look of the Ratskin and Redemptionist.

The tiny composition sketch refers to an image I’m not sure I’ve ever posted online, my Badland Scout (from 2005). He’s a guide to the ruined hives so has a little bit of a tribal look to his gear.

These next pages feature a sketch of the priest from the start of The Fifth Element (the late actor John Bennett), a bunch of Scavvies and then some Pit Slave portrait compositions.

All fan art and not intended to infringe Games Workshop’s copyright.

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Chaos Pirate of Nurgle

Games Workshop, for their ‘End Times’ projects, have recently created some new Nurgle miniatures and I felt they needed to reflect more of the characters’ written background on the miniatures themselves.  Now, bear in mind I haven’t read much of the latest text but ‘Gutrot Spume’ is meant to be the leader of the Chaos God Nurgle’s plague fleets and yet has nothing bar his tentacles to reflect his maritime nature.

Here’s my sketchbook page where I imagined a more piratical Chaos Champion with an Estalian (Warhammer Spanish) Conquistador feel (morion helmet and breastplate with tassets, slashed sleeves and so forth). I based his pose on the existing Gutrot Spume miniature, adding a ship’s bell on his back, corroded, barnacled armour, a bottle of rotgut grog and a Daemon sword. One of his tentacles also holds a Nurgle death’s head.

 

And now I worked the picture up into the following image (separating him into layers in Photoshop and using Painter 12 to paint above and below the layers). I changed the pistol to a Nurgle-daemon themed triple-barrelled duckfoot pistol.

I imagined he had the following rewards of Chaos:

Captain Eduardo ‘Worm-beard’ Montalban

Chaos Attributes:
Atrophy(leg)
Hideous Appearance
Zoological mutation 1 arm of an Octopus. (Combine tentacle and suckers rules)
Multiple arms +2
Chaos Rewards:
Chaos Armour
Daemon Weapon
Gifts of Nurgle:
Hide of Nurgle
Immensity
Trail of Slime

As with all my games related artwork, it is fan art and not intended to infringe Games Workshop’s copyright.

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YakTribe Gaming logo

The new YakTribe gaming site is finished and using my logo design to boot! YakTribe is a fan site devoted to long-lost favorite games published by Games Workshop (Necromunda and Mordheim and GorkaMorka soon). It’s very well done so if you have an interest in this sort of thing I recommend it.

The brief was to create a logo of a yak head and I recalled seeing an ancient Citadel Miniatures catalogue which had a couple of science-fiction versions of a minotaur. They had guns for horns so I figured this could be a special pit-fighter on Necromunda; a mutant abhuman cyborg! I believe they were sculpted by the talented Nick Bibby (they looked like modified Nick Bibby minotaurs.) I’ve tracked them down to here:
http://www.sodemons.com/rhrare/40kminos/index.htm/

This is the progression of my picture in Painter:

Here’s the final image:

And the YakTribe website can be found here:
http://gaming.yaktribe.org/

And also I contributed some other images for Ash Wastes Nomads and their badge.

With the Ash Wastes Nomad design I was both homaging John Blanche’s original intricate Confrontation drawing ( http://gothicpunk.tumblr.com/image/8512253130″) whilst also respecting the newer versions produced for Necromunda and adding some extra ideas on top!

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Silas Alberec Captain of the Exorcists 3rd Company

Here’s my picture I produced for a Graphic Illustrator job at Forge World (I didn’t get it but did receive some very useful positive feedback). It’s from the Badab War (Book 2) by Alan Bligh and depicts Silas Alberec surveying the battlefield.  I based him on my what I imagined an ogre-sized heroic space marine superhuman would look like!  He’s taller than even an Imperial Space Marine would be; vaguely like a steroid-pumped Max von Sydow as Father Merrin in The Exorcist movie.

The ‘Orison of the Broken Tower’ symbol on his tilt shield I created from scratch based on the Tower Tarot Card and all the warding sigils and symbols were based on masonic symbols and hexagrams modified by me. There wasn’t space on my image for the cod-latin exorcisms that I had planned for his face.

All quotes are from Alan Bligh’s description of him in the back of the Badab War Book 2.

Copyright Games Workshop. Used with permission.

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GHAAN-OG The Berserker

Ghaan-og The Berserker

Finally my first non-Christmas themed comic page (apart from my Mr. Scarecrow one which I drew at art college).
I approached this as a professional comic book artist would, from (my own)script, thumbnails, drawing and inking the panels and so on. An excellent exercise; it really made me appreciate the skill of my favourite comic-book writers, letterers, colourists and artists.

The next one will be at least two pages long!

Fonts by Blambot

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SF team ideas

Continuing the Science Fiction theme; are some of my early ideas for a group of SF characters (I think I first put these online on my ImagineFX sketchbook page).
(The doodles on the left are ideas for a rebels army for WH40K I was working on and some habitat buildings.)
SF team ideas 2
Here we have a shotgun-toting woman, a scarred veteran warrior and a robot (like Wallbanger in 2000AD’s Bad Company). On the other side we have a sniper (with bionic eyes) and a detective or investigator. I didn’t have more than a vague notion for what their purpose was so I left the idea for a while.
SF team ideas 2

Now in 2009 I wanted to return to these characters (adding a friendly mutant) and refining their shapes. Again they lacked a cohesive sense of purpose so again they got shelved.
SF team ideas 3
SF team ideas 4

I’m working on the new versions, with a more fixed idea of what they are, at the moment.

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Ideas for alien designs

Here are some sketches of aliens (and a doodle of a Fungi from Yuggoth) from way back in 2005. There is a point to me showing them now; I shall explain in later posts!

Alien sketches

Here is an alternative alien idea for Inquisitor or similar Science Fiction game. A kind of holy warrior with a plasma gun.

Beaked Alien design

And finally is a centaur-like alien who lives on a rocky planet or moon(hence his armoured shell) with high light radiation from it’s Sun and a relatively thin atmosphere. He (it?) has evolved to eat sillicates and get nutrients from them and has two sets of eyes for seeing in the dark and the bright sunlight.

Centauroid alien

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