As promised here’s the next character for my Sunken World adventuring party, a thief with concealed daggers, climbing rope, caltrops, throwing knives and reinforced leather armour disguised with the same pattern on the rest of her clothes.
I’ve finally got round to putting more of my artwork on this website, I’m sorry it’s been so long!
I always have a few projects on the go; here are some more Sunken world images: a Sunken World character I created a couple of years ago; one of those images I needed a little bit of free time to finish off.
She’s a Raktos, (Raktos and Yrdin) a race of horn-headed humanoids who are rumoured to be half-demonic and they do little to dispel that rumour. Many of them do possess magical powers so I drew a couple of flames on her fingertips. She is accompanying the warrior who I posted a while back on my Facebook Page:
I’ve ideas for the rest of this adventuring group which I shall post next time.
I’ve been really busy with a few commissions the last couple of months, mainly Hysterical Games’ Panzerfäuste fantasy WW2 game (which is still ongoing) and a couple of others which I’ve finished but are yet to be announced officially.
So I thought I’d post something from my many sketches that I’ve scanned onto my computer and not posted before. I found these characterful creatures which were one of my possible foes for my Fantasy Fight picture back in 2008. I may well re-use these ideas in a future project as I quite like their distinct shapes.
Here’s my image which I designed on isometric paper as an exercise in a Diablo I and II style isometric perspective.
Isometric graphics in video games on Wikipedia
More sketches over the next few days.
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.
All fan art and not intended to breach Games Workshop copyright.
A link from my Facebook site (do have a look and like it, if indeed you do like it!). Click on the Facebook image to the right or here:
Will Beck Illustration
Here are my ‘Deadworld Ghouls’ from 2009, inspired by my fighting (as Raziel) the cowardly Slaughs in the videogames Soul Reaver and Soul Reaver 2, (Sluagh image and description) I liked their gleeful expression in the game and imagined mine lurking in the dark on ruined world attacking adventurers or travellers (only when they outnumbered them!). I wasn’t quite sure about their design at the time so I put these on the back-burner.
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.
A sketchbook page from earlier this year:
There’s some dog-men sketches at the top – I was inspired by the make-up/mask work on the Die Antwoord video for Pitbull Terrier, which is a bit crazy and gory and so probably not safe for work and certainly not for children. Here’s a link if you’re interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvMXVHVr72A
The birdman sage idea I had when looking at a picture of an horned owl (with it’s longer ‘ear’ feathers) and I thought this would be a good look for an older, wise bird-man (or bird-woman).
The coloured in Space Orks are my ideas for what GW could have done when they brought out a plastic Space Ork Painboy earlier this year – some head options that reflected the classic Kev Adams Space Orks but in the newer, more brutal style.
GW stuff (Space Orks, Painboyz and so on) is fan art and not intended to infringe copyright.
Here’s my idea from way back in 2011 for a Nurgle Chaos Warrior Champion (a Nurgle Plague Knight, with twisted heraldry as described in the Lost and The Damned book) as Games Workshop seem to be going all Nurglesque at the moment.
As always; this is fan art and not intended to infringe on Games Workshop’s intellectual property.
Whilst I’m busy with various things I thought I’d share these sketchbook fantasy scenes I drew a few years ago. The first one (the market) I think I posted on the ImagineFX forum. The second one depicts an ancient statue that has been built into the side of a tavern. The perspective is wonky but I still like them both. These are spontaneous drawings that I kept adding to when I had a spare moment.
Another beasty from my Sunken World – a flying-fishman commando (one of the many servants of the Thulhids) with various tools of his trade.
