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.
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