Aiee! Run From Kelvin's Brainsplurge!

I stumbled across this art today:


(I discovered that it's from a 2015 Age of Sigmar book and I can't tell you who the artist is because in 2015 Games Workshop wasn't big on giving credit to individual staff members.)

What struck me about the picture was how different it is to the standard GW house style, which tends to be more painterly. Actual drawings have very much gone out of fashion in Nottingham, so I was surprised but happy to see eight pages of this at the beginning of the book.

Alas, it's presented as a flashback and the final page blends from this style into your bog-standard GW painting, so there's a sense that it's literally "only a dream", but it's still nice to see a different style of art appear in a modern GW product. Maybe there are more that I have missed.

My primary artistic influence has always been comics. I devoured them as a child, reading them cover to cover then grabbing a pencil or pen and drawing my own stories on any bit of paper I could find. It's fair to say, however, that I was also influenced and inspired, in no small part, by the imagery of fantasy gaming. Now, since I was a bit of a solitary sort, this meant that I spent a lot of time reading issues of White Dwarf with no real understanding of what the articles were about, as I wasn't playing the games. For kids like me, there was also Fighting Fantasy, which allowed us to pretend we were playing Dungeons & Dragons, even if we had no mates. The books also had some great art -- and let's be honest, the art was often much better than the story/game in the text -- and because the British game industry was a bit isolated and incestuous back then, you'd see the same artists popping up in different publications from different companies. As a result, British gaming products of the time developed a unique look, quite distinct from the visual style of the American gaming culture.

So while the Americans would be getting this:

We'd be getting this:

No contest.

One of my favourite artists from that time was Russ Nicholson, whose work combined an eye for fine detail with a talent for making the fantasy seem eldritch and strange. His style wasn't all that similar to that of John Blanche or Ian Miller, but they all shared a proper evocation of the weird that you just didn't see in American fantasy art.

I was pleased to discover that Nicholson was not only still working, but had started a blog, and when he ran a competition to win a piece of original art, I jumped at the chance.

I won:


I've never been one for chasing original art, and I'm not sure why, as it's great to have a piece by one of my favourite artists. Thanks Russ!

Here in Blighty, our public monuments tend to be statues of dead white guys. In Japan, as always, things are different:

(I know.)

I've never been particularly satisfied with using the mouse for digital art; it's not particularly intuitive, and it strains the arm and hand in a way that the pencil/pen doesn't, so I've often looked into the idea of using a graphics tablet. However, I've never taken the plunge because, despite being a gamer for decades, I've always been concerned about how the hand/eye coordination thing is going to work; the very concept of "drawing" at the desk but having the results appear somewhere else bothers me slightly. And I don't know anyone local or well enough that has a tablet that I could borrow and try out. Also, the things have been hideously expensive up until very recently. So it's always been a case of a lot of umming and ahing and not much tabletting.

So birthdays are good, because people can buy you what they like, and you don't have to worry about the burden of buyer's remorse, even if the gift is rubbish (it's not) and will spend the rest of its life shunned at the back of a cupboard (it won't). This year, I got a Wacom Bamboo One, and while I haven't done much with it yet, I've had a bit of a play, and I think I can work with it. It is weird, but not in the insurmountable way I thought it would be. It will take a lot of practice before I'm anywhere near competent with it, but it should be good enough for my purposes; at the moment, I mainly use the computer for colouring and lettering, but I could see myself drawing directly on the screen once I'm more confident with the gear.

One question though: how is the pen powered? It's very light, so I don't think there's a battery in there, yet it has to be powered somehow for the buttons to work. Doesn't it? I'm confused, and the minimal documentation isn't very helpful. This is the kind of thing that occupies my thoughts, so do help if you can.