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 Irbis wrote:

Yup, and that's why the biggest, most popular releases aimed at kids in the last 20 years, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, My Little Pony, Gravity Falls, Twilight, Eragon, Golden Compass, Train Your Dragon, etc, etc, were full of adults doing macho stuff. Oh, wait, no, they were starring kids and teenagers. Maybe you should realize you're not the centre of the universe and your tastes might not be universal pinnacle?

But maybe that's just the rotten west. Let's see what was most popular in Japan - Bleach, One Piece, Naruto, Psyren, Carole & Tuesday, Bookworm, Abyss, etc, etc, etc, also somehow don't follow the adult best nonsense and funnily enough most popular series are about kids and teenagers. I wonder why when this market is far more cutthroat than western one and you can't fake/buy manga popularity and it has to be genuinely outdoing all competition in serialized press before getting chance of animation or even standalone release?

Even the really dark, violent series that could teach Warhammer a thing or two about grimdark like say Goblin Slayer, Claymore, Berserk, Fate, Overlord, etc, etc, funnily enough don't do the adult gak either. Late teens or at worst characters that barely entered 20s. Aka, someone relatable to kids. But I guess the whole planet must be wrong, eh?

Funnily enough, the real reason why cartoons used to contain only adults was because back then, they were toy ads - and executives believed macho garbage they could relate to sells better. You have been brainwashed by commercials meddled by old dudes who didn't know any better so hard they warped your worldview, and when market sent these to dustbin once competition by stuff that kids really wanted to read killed them, you found yourself doing the first part of the meme that ends up in someone saying "OK BOOMER". Which is good summation what today's young think of "cool gak" as seen by "adults"

No really.... tell me how you really feel. Don't hold back.

<Scribbles notes into notebook and nods along>

They are right tho.

This one is a doozy, not one I have seen before. Had the Oldhammer group on FB stumped although most think it is by Paul Bonner, possibly around the Chaos Terminator release date

Would be interesting to know the story behind it. Is it a loyalist terminator that has found himself surrounded? It looks like Beastmen in the background there.

Anyone who doesn't like this is heretical chaos filth.


https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammer40k/images/b/b7/Rogue_Trader_FCover.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20101106211728

It does have a lot of low-budget charm

It's a classic! And good enough for Bolt Thrower to use for their album.

I only hope people who say the new stuff is better mean the 5th/ 6th painted stuff, and not the 7th and onwards digital stuff. The latter is mostly awful, soulless, mobile game loading screen worthy disgrace that made me stop buying codieces and rulebooks.

A lot of the early art style seems to have been adopted from comic art of the period like 2000AD , or earlier games like D&D.

Not all of it was good, but there could be a lot of humor and soul in it.

I sometimes feel the artist only had a loose brief to work on and came up with their own interpretation of it.

Often looking at more modern art pieces they do seem to perfect and too clinical even go to say far too polished and perfect. It sort of leaves out the imagination. Something that was always important in role play and early tabletop war games.

I will say the previewed Death Guard art is a notable step in the right direction.

I'm not terribly nostalgic towards the vintage artwork. I remember considering some of it rubbish even back then. However, it's still fun trawling through this thread, as well as scrolling through the old rulebooks and white dwarf's.

I think my top 4 of GW artists has always been (in no order of importance):
• Jes Goodwin (GW visual identity architecht)
• John Blanche (GW visual identity architecht)
• Kevin Walker (His grayscale works are superb in that "shaded" comic book style)
• Paul Bonner (His RT-2nd Ed Ork illustrations are canon to me; Current Ork art & fluff is meh)

Everyone else, well, they had some good ones, but also horrible ones. These four were pretty consistent and I reckon their works will stand the test of time.

As for the new "Renaissance Propaganda" -style artwork? I like it, but it is rather derivative and therefore quite bland at times. It reminds me a bit about being in the Louvre - after a while of seeing the endless rows of EPIC oil paintings, your mind starts craving for some supernaive/primitive, rough & raw street art. Too much stuff in the same artistic style saturates the mind and makes everything feel less important when stuffed together like that.

But lets consider holistic feel of the GW print material for a second shall we? IMHO the old books were very much more chaotic and "amateurish" looking, but that combined with the layouts and typography of the books, give a more "honest" feel to them; there wasnt a significant quality mismatch between the two. The new books have very fine "Louvre tier" looking artwork, but the schoolbook style layouts and frankly boring/weak typography makes the whole feel "Conflicted/Dishonest". Kinda feels like a golden toilet, why go to all the trouble of creating fantastical illustrations and then drop the ball on the rest of the book layout/pagination and typography? Its like a stereotype of a rich russian oligarch - too much money and not enough taste to use it meaningfully.

TL;DR = Good and bad art existed before, just like now; only difference is that early GW was honest about being a PEW PEW tabletop geek game and current GW is pretending like 40K is the epitome of classical art or something, while in reality its still a PEW PEW tabletop game.

Some 'new' pieces (a few of which I hadn't seen before), these are courtesy of a Twitter account 'Original Oldhammer Artwork' which seems to find old copies of very rare, or at least sparingly printed, old GW art.

These are by Martin McKenna from the late 80s. I recognise the one with the marines firing upwards (I'm sure it was used in the original Horus Heresy or Space Marine/Epic rulebook?) but the others are new to me!

Very nice - Love the guards officers, look like the pics in White Dwarf back in the day, but not seen that one before

I suspect this may be relevant to this threads' interests.

https://merch.warhammer.com/collections/white-dwarf?page=1

Sadly doesn't go all the way back to the earliest WD, but you never know what they'll add.

I really like the mutants picture above! Now that is the sort of thing that inspires a man to do some conversions :-)

A couple more rarer pieces - this time Space Wolves, and an older one from original Space Marine/Epic 1st edition (I think).
The Space Wolf ones are (again, I think!) John Blanche - the 3rd picture is a close crop of the 2nd. Remember seeing these in the WD that came out around the release of the 2nd edition Space Wolf codex, where the Wolves were fleshed out into what really was their modern representation. There was an awesome story in that issue of WD about Ragnar and pals taking on Tyranids.







Finally this one is nicked from the Epic FB page - sadly it's a really low resolution, will see if I can find a better copy of it because it's awesome in it's full form and so much detail with the little marines running around shooting each other

I liked all the artwork up to about 3rd edition, then I found the whole artwork theme of everyone look left...everyone look right...everyone look forward to get repetetive , boring and just stupid, I can't stand most of GW's art today because of that

I do

Here is one I haven't seen before that's really cool, courtesy of Old Warhammer Art

Early sketch for the cover of Space Crusade

Have just been reading through the original Space Hulk Deathwing book - don't think a lot of these have featured in the thread so far, here are some of my favourites. Apologies for the quality of some of the scans (and I'm sorry guys I was eating a pastry and some of that may have got into one of them!)

I've referenced the artist in each case


Tony Hough


Christopher 'Fangorn' Baker


Steven Tappin


Steven Tappin


Gary Harrod


Steven Tappin

More to come..




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Kevin Walker


Kevin Walker


Paul Bonner


Mark Gibbons


Steven Tappin


Kevin Walker

Some brilliant ones there, many I have never seen before!

Those do a great job of illustrating that sense of claustrophobic terror.

I don't know how many times across nearly 4 decades I've looked at this image, but I only just realised it's a Marine's geneseed being saved and not a medic dunking a biscuit into a well-earned cup of tea.

Lots of great ones in the space hulk group. Cool to see some native american influenced terminators

.Mikes. wrote:I don't know how many times across nearly 4 decades I've looked at this image, but I only just realised it's a Marine's geneseed being saved and not a medic dunking a biscuit into a well-earned cup of tea.

This actually made me spit out my tea when I read that comment. Excellent

Illumini wrote:Lots of great ones in the space hulk group. Cool to see some native american influenced terminators

If you haven't read it yet, I recommend Bill/William King's short story Deathwing. IMO, it's the single best bet of short story set within the 40k universe, and objectively I think is definitely the coolest!

I'm not sure if it is available for download, I know that there was some talk of it being completely retconned, but I don't know if that was ever official.

I'm choosing to believe the tea version.

It's just too good not to.

 Pacific wrote:
A couple more rarer pieces - this time Space Wolves, and an older one from original Space Marine/Epic 1st edition (I think).
The Space Wolf ones are (again, I think!) John Blanche - the 3rd picture is a close crop of the 2nd. Remember seeing these in the WD that came out around the release of the 2nd edition Space Wolf codex, where the Wolves were fleshed out into what really was their modern representation. There was an awesome story in that issue of WD about Ragnar and pals taking on Tyranids.

[pedant]WEhile that short story was new for the 2nd edition Codex, that new-style Space Wolves army list first appeared over a year before 2nd edition came out. It was the last full army list introduced for 1st edition 40k, although by that point the visual style was pretty much 2nd edition. That's why the Ragnar model has those claws rounds his feet (even on the Primaris version); in 1st edition they were a special wargear item that gave him an additional Kick attack. In the nearly 30 years since the end of 1st edition, they've been useless.

It's interesting seeing the full pieces originally intended as book covers - all the serious action is in the bottom and middle right, with a space at the top for the title and on the left for the back cover blurb.

 Pacific wrote:

If you haven't read it yet, I recommend Bill/William King's short story Deathwing. IMO, it's the single best bet of short story set within the 40k universe, and objectively I think is definitely the coolest!

It really is. It really effected me when I was young reading it for the first time. I got a PDF of the rulebook a few years back and re-read it and it's still excellent.

I don't think I ever really forgave GW when they pivoted and removed the NA history from the Dark Angels. the Deathwing book convinced me to pour my hard earned paper round money into buying the terminator box and and going all in dark angels. It was just so cool.
They apparently changed it to avoid being seen as culturally insensitive. Which is fine on its own, but didn't stop them going all Swedish Chef over the Space Wolves. But in my mind, Deathwing is what the Dark Angels will always be.

Have they actually explicitly retconned it though or just left it on the shelf gathering dust?

I always reconciled it with the planet that the terminator unit came from was just one of the DA recruiting grounds, which obviously would have fallen out of use for a while after the events of Deathwing.

OK. Own up. Who else looked for the pastry?

 Pacific wrote:
Have they actually explicitly retconned it though or just left it on the shelf gathering dust?

Retconned. The HH novels focussing on the DA is all around European-esque knights with faux biblical names. No native american references at all.