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That's as Grimdark as Tau will ever be.

Joyboozer wrote:

Nomeny wrote:
I love that the Tau Codex is almost entirely devoid of his artwork!

Why would their most imaginitive artist provide work for the bland race?
I'd love to see his take on tau.

Here's what John Blanche had planned for the Tau before they had even decided upon them as the next race to add to 40k:

(warning: image is quite large)

EDIT: dammit, ninja'd

Before entering the thread I assumed that this would be a Blanche praise thread. I am genuinely surprised by the number of posters that do not like his work. But like any art it is obviously subjective so his work was always going to be divisive amongst fans of 40k/Fantasy.

Personally I have always loved his work. For me his aesthetic is very visually pleasing and memories if his art are a big part of my early days in the hobby so I guess there is a fair bit of nostalgia in there too. I also love how his bigger compositions told a myriad of mini stories with so many unique characters and possibilties. Yet I can see how his style and often limited pallete could be off putting to some.

But, for me, a massive thumbs up and thank you to Mr Blanche.

I like Blanche's work. Its what I think of when I think of 40k.

I like JB artwork. He can express a sense of 'realism' in his drawings that more 'realistic' artists don't do, in that his feel like someone illustrated a real person, expression, or object (even though it is a fictional construct), while a lot of modern artists seem to be drawing showroom cars rather than people.

It might be just the trained hand and educated mind that Kilkrazy mentioned earlier, but I do think it shows, even if his artwork doesn't float everyone's goat.

I know that I've already had my say, but looking back on my first encounters with 40k when I was in ~4th grade, Blanche's artwork scared the hell out of me. In art class we had been given a pretty heavily simplified lesson on Picasso & pointillism. The major takeaway was that if you look at anything closely enough, it will eventually look like nothing at all. Later that week, my friend brought in his dad's copy of what I'm pretty sure was the 3rd-ed 40k rulebook, and I can remember holding my eye almost directly to the cover, trying to find a single spot that still didn't tell a story of its own. The complete overload of details (and of course the spooky skulls) was terrifying & gave me a headache, but it totally changed my perception of art. I can entirely see why a lot of people don't like Blanche's style. I've only started to truly appreciate it over the past few years now that I'm old enough to realize how important it was to how I view art.

@ youidiot kid: Yes, absolutely!

I didn't like Blanche's artwork much when I was a child, and looking back it's because I found it really uncomfortable and unsettling to look at – exactly the qualities that I now find so attractive and resonant about it.

An old lecturer of mine once told me something that stuck with me – 'great art should make the viewer uncomfortable, because it demands something in return.'

@ youidiot kid
It's very simple why looking closely at JB's work always yields more detail; he actually draws all his details with a skull fractal stencil; If you look closely at his art you will see every detail is made up of skulls.

Further too this, if you look too closely at any of these skulls you will see they too are made up of skulls. This pattern in Blanche's art continues down all the way to the sub atomic level.

To paraphrase a famous quote 'Its skulls all the way down'.

In 10 thousand years scientists will investigate this, and it will be come the first documented evidence of warp-stress in the real world.