ECHOES OF IMPERIUM

John Blanche, a friend, an inspiration and an artist. You can find him on Facebook in many hobby groups.

M19 represented not just a hobby challenge nor an excuse to meet old friends and make some new ones but a celebration of my favourite project of image creation as GW art director, the first project in that role, and what really amounts to the start of the grim dark and the pathetic as opposed to big bright shiny armies.

But as usual I had very little time to create a Mordheim warband and a complete inability to learn and master rules, so I decided to create a ghostly hunt floating and galloping across the land and dealing death to any in their path. Tuomas Pirinen wrote some special rules which gave me a basic framework to infiltrate any table, achieved by drawing a card and suddenly appear galloping across the gaming board unannounced and throwing chaos amongst the players there. The Hunt’s movement was 8 inch plus a D6 with direction determined by a scatter dice, if they made contact with a figure then they were hit on a four plus.

I chose galloping and floating ghast wraiths as the dynamic of the range just projects forward momentum and movement, I also concepted much of this range with an Apocalypse 1500 AD vibe at the back of my mind when doing it. As I was about to start painting I got a set of contrast paints and set about experimenting, I thought that these new paints seemed to have the translucent quality of oils and using lots of medium would work best as washes, just like painting a picture. I gave it a go and discovered that I would have them all painted in an afternoon as opposed to my usual speed of one in an afternoon.

To lay it on thin for me, I don’t remember the games too much to be honest as meeting old friends and spending time with Tuomas plus the marvellous city of Helsinki kind of overtook the weekend, what started as a weekend game became a mini holiday – husahhh!