160 AOS28, INQ28 and Blanchitsu Movement

Welcome fair reader to the darker, grittier side of our merry tale. 

It has long been known that for every dastardly villain there is glittering hero. You will have been told how every action of a ne'erdowell sees our glittering heroes stand ready with acts of valour and honour.

Everything you have been told is a lie.

There has long been a style of art within the traditional Gamesworkshop culture that is more gritty, more manic and more mindbogglingly insane than the mainstream of clean, ordered and manicured art.

Many have influenced this style and many have contributed to it, some even being drawn fully into its family, but there can only really be one father to it and that father is John Blanche.

The early years of Gamesworkshop were moulded by some great artists, great sculptors and great writers. John Blanche is one of those great artists and his influence has been felt greatly down the years with some of the most mind altering art you will have seen. Now as much as his art and his style have influenced the Grim Darkness the mainstream culture of GW has always been more clean.

When the Inquisitor skirmish game popped into existence it started a spark in some key people in the genre and even when Inquisitor and its 54mm scale faded with so many of GWs Specialist Games it hung on grimly in Inq28.

Inq28 embodies the gritty realism of the Grim Dark of the Far Future. Ever hero is a dark troubled soul. Ever villain a complex character of startling complexity. There is no black and white merely shades of insanity.

Many of you will have seen the now regular Blanchitsu article in White Dwarf where the amazing art of John Blanche has transferred into the 3D forms of some amazing models. Not just from John himself back many others.

You may also have been lucky enough to have seen the tale of Pilgrym unfold in the pages of WD or see the amazing Diorama in Warhammer World.

That little tale brought together some of the great story tellers and model makers of the genre in one great narrative of the deepest darkest corners of the Imperium and Inq28.

Coming right upto to date now with the changes from Warhammer Fantasy Battle, which had its own darker side in the for of Mordheim, into Age of Sigmar and its High Fantasy style. The new style of AoS is again much brighter, cleaner and of a more ostentatious style quite out of place with the grittier setting that those of the Inq28 and Mordheim mould felt comfortable with and so now we have the first movements in a new style; AOS28.

AOS28 takes the dark, grim insanity of Inq28 and fits it straight into the worlds of AOS and wow! Already there are some amazing things happening in it!

If you have instgram a quick #AOS28 will show you some amazing models and art. I will be joining this journey in my own way and while a somewhat less impressive way than the amazing things you will see there hopefully I can add something to it even in a small way.

111 Blanchitsu in Necromunda

Been trawling the interwebs today rather than my attic but I have still managed to find some real gems by that great artist and GW image guru John Blanche.

Let me take you back, back beyond Necromunda, back to Confrontation.....

 Old school scavy chic; this is the essence of grimdark!

063 Blanchitsu and Gothic Punk

Just a quick note to say if you haven't already seen much of John Blanche's work then go here .

That is all :-)

032 Conversion Perversion

My biggest passion with modelling and painting as a whole has been the ability to convert models from their original design, to adapt them and make them more my own creation. Now quite often these are very minor changes, a head swap, an extra pack or different weapon but even these simple little changes can completely change the model.

I really enjoy the making of the models as well as the painting, something I know a lot of people don’t really share with many people seeing the simpler a model and the lower the part count the better as they are simply barriers to painting or barriers to gaming.

But for me a big part of the fun is fitting all those fiddly bits together and being able to add or omit to make the model mine.

I wont say I am particularly adept at conversions and especially not any complicated ideas with Green Stuff but I am always secretly pleased when I can look at a model and know that if you hadn't seen the original you would think it was a whole new model as created.

You can see here some examples of what I have done in the past, Chaos Marauders switched so barbarian guards men or chaos militia, Beastmen as Abhuman recruits and the even simpler medieval guard recruits or PDF.

I have long thought about getting into conversions that are a little more adventurous but have always erred on the side of a failed conversion is an expensive waste but these days I have started to realise that I am no longer the cash strapped youngster that struggle to make ends meet and a few quids worth of model is not all that big a lose if all goes wrong.

With that in mind I am starting to plan out some grander scale or at least more extensive conversions, perhaps not as rich and extravagant as the Blanchitsu I see going on in places such as ironsleet  or Officio convertorum but a good starting place for me.