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30k Era Portraits - Lheor Portrait

Iron Hands Fanatic

By Iron Hands Fanatic
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Iron Hands Fanatic Venerable Brother

Iron Hands Fanatic

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I wanted to make a new thread for this stuff, because it's moving away from the design approach my other illustrations take, and it's more about character pieces.

Anyhow, this thread is basically for a series of portraits I want to do to flesh out the hierarchy of my (planned) 30k force, as well as a number of other illustrations for characters which may well have nothing to do with my HH army.

The style is purposely similar to that of the illustrations featured in Forge World's Heresy books, which is coincidentally really similar to the style I use for sketching anyway, which works nicely.

So without further ado, we have:

med_gallery_53779_9225_566515.jpg

Princeps Maxima Alestia Reuvann,

Officer of the Legio Astraman, Commander of the Ebon Vigil, Warden of the Dawngate

Here's a sepia version:

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med_gallery_53779_9225_572908.jpg

gallery_53779_9225_572908.jpg

I'm pretty happy with her considering the time investment - ideally I would have made her skin a little bit darker, but it would have sucked up considerably more time.

I'll probably post up some background for her in a bit, but suffice to say, she's the Princeps of a Warlord Titan in command of a sub-Legio of the Legio Astraman.

For some idea of who else is on the table, the organisational chart I made here gives a rough idea of who the major players are:

http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/topic/316214-clan-brannsar-of-the-xth-legion/

That said, I will be doing a number of unrelated portraits occasionally - the first I'm considering is the commander of Fulgrim's Phoenix Guard

Anyway, thanks for looking, all comments & criticism welcome :smile.:

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Iron Hands Fanatic Venerable Brother

Iron Hands Fanatic

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I love this kind of stuff.

Following :biggrin.:

 

Thanks! Admittedly, this is gonna be an occasional thing as a break from the style of the other work I post up here, so I can't promise it'll be regular

 

Absolutely great.

 

Mind you, if you could colourise the image exactly with the kind of off-white that Forge World use in their HH books, it would be perfect. Kind of a reddish-brown tint?

 

Thanks man - yeah, the sepia images I spoiler-tagged don't really work great, but I'm sure I can come up with something which works better if I put more than a couple of seconds into it :happy.: 

 

You're out of your element, Donnie!

 

And your Titan.

 

If Jeff Bridges creeps into any of these illustrations I'm blaming you :tongue.:

 

Looks great man! Loving the implants.

 

Thanks, I purposely kept them relatively minimal, but I've got plans for at least one Mechanicum character who'll be more augmented

 

Looking good; a dramatis persone thread is one I'll be keen to watch. 

Hopefully I'll get some background done for her before I post the next illustration :tongue.:

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  • 1 year later...
Iron Hands Fanatic Venerable Brother

Iron Hands Fanatic

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Huh, hasn't even been two years since that illustration and I already kinda hate it - might need to do a new version so it bothers me less.

Anyway, yeah I'm back - I may be doing pieces like these with a bit more regularity, although the standard I hold my work to has apparently increased significantly,

but to start me off, I've done an iconography illustration to act as a kind of chapter heading, in the same style as the paintings in the Forge World Heresy books:

med_gallery_53779_9225_1139.png

http://image.boltera...9_9225_1139.png

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Iron Hands Fanatic Venerable Brother

Iron Hands Fanatic

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Amazing Job, really looks like it is right out of a HH Rulebook!

 

Thanks, it's a really fun style to use, so I'll probably be doing a few similar illustrations in the future

 

Damn, that's a pretty brutal symbol. As Kor Dalron says, it looks straight out one of the books too.

 

Thanks! It's a combination of a couple of custom bits of iconography I've designed over the years, but it came together much better than I expected

 

Absolutely amazing. Wish you would create some for my wardens as well.

 

Haha, thanks - I'll be opening up slots for commissions later in the year, so I'll keep you posted :wink: 

 

That's pretty metal... great job!

 

Thanks - for anyone uninitiated into 40k, I say it's a metal album cover :happy.:

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MikhalLeNoir Venerable Brother

MikhalLeNoir

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Absolutely amazing. Wish you would create some for my wardens as well.

 

 

Haha, thanks - I'll be opening up slots for commissions later in the year, so I'll keep you posted ;) 

 

Yessss

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Iron Hands Fanatic Venerable Brother

Iron Hands Fanatic

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So I took a page out of the classics and did another painting in the same style, but to a much higher standard, thus rendering the first illustration kinda garbage in my mind :teehee:

Anyway, here's the realisation of a design I did for the Vakrah Jal Chapter's Icon a couple years back (Argel Tal's Chapter post-Isstvan):

med_gallery_53779_9225_956229.png

http://bolterandchainsword.com/uploads/gallery/album_9225/gallery_53779_9225_956229.png

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  • 2 months later...
Iron Hands Fanatic Venerable Brother

Iron Hands Fanatic

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Hey folks, bit of a status update on what to potentially expect fro this stuff (and my unit concept / design work) in the future:

 

Thread Admin:

 

Okay, so I’ve been pondering reorganizing for a while – part of it’s driven by how bloated some of my older threads have gotten, and how my changing standards make a hard reset appealing. The other part of it comes from a professional capacity – now my Masters is winding down, I’m looking to go into freelance illustration at least semi-professionally, and various members have expressed interest in commissioning me over the years, so separating illustration work (iconography, character portraiture etc.) from my concept art / unit design would provide a good opportunity for portfolio / commission purposes.

 

The current plan is to make a new thread for illustration work (most likely with entirely new content save for a couple of iconography pieces) in the WIP forum that I’ll also use to showcase any commissions I do that are related to the content covered on the B&C.

 

The second reorganising aspect is consolidating rules / unit design into a single space. I’ve had separate threads for vehicle & infantry designs, 40k / 30k designs and further subdivisions over the years, and combining them into a single coherent thread will make my life easier, as well as allowing easier navigation for folks who follow my work. Any artwork related to these designs will go here too, but this will likely differ significantly in quality and style to the content in my planned illustration thread. I’m still ruminating on where to put this thread – while the Age of Darkness system is my current focus for this stuff, there’s always the possibility that I’ll branch out, and while I’m not sure this stuff qualifies as a special project, both that forum & WIP are appealing. Just to note, this isn’t necessarily an indicator that I’ll be continuing with this stuff apace, but that’s addressed further down.

 

The Future:

 

Yup, that’s a dramatic & ambiguous heading, but I’m still apprehensive about shouting about what I’m really considering: crowdfunding. Dithering aside, what this comes down to is the interaction between time pressures and my perfectionism.

 

I really enjoy doing concept work for 30k / 40k, and even when I have zero time to spend on it, I never stop coming up with ideas – I’ve become so immersed in the universe over the years its just what my brain does at quiet moments. But as I transition from my Masters to freelance art, I can’t afford to spare the time to do this stuff to the standard I’d like, and as a complete dumbass perfectionist, even doing high quality one-offs means I subsequently set that as my standard.

 

In terms of ‘quality I’d like’, honestly that includes well-written lore, points costs, formatting stuff as useable PDFs and *high quality* artwork. In that last case, I’ve only ever shared super rough work here, very basic stuff that translates my idea into a visual format as simply as possible, but I’d love to do more, especially when I’m considering designs that deviate more and more from existing miniatures.

 

Take for example the design I did a while back for heresy-era Lheor firefist – the initial plan was to produce a PDF page (in the same format as the Downloadable rules from FW’s site, so I’m not plagiarising any images) of rules with the art in the background. A year ago, that art took me 3 days. These are examples of artwork that took me a single day each from the last couple of months. If I was ever gonna follow through with the plan for Lheor, I’d want to do a full-colour portrait instead of that shoddy painting, and that’s the issue I have.

 

At the moment, I barely have time to write vaguely reasonable rules, and I find that the easiest part of the process. People ask me about timeframes for when I’ll finish unit concepts, and understandably want some form of art so they can envision designs that are entirely encapsulated within my imagination, but it sucks that I can barely scrape together the most basic showing when I could be producing much more polished content.

 

So I just wanted to put feelers out there to see if there’d be any interest in me setting up a Patreon or some such so that I can make the kind of stuff I’d like to without cutting into time I need to be spending on earning a living.

 

Concerns:

 

Admittedly this stuff does get a bit murky, so I’ll make some provisos: obviously with the B&C’s new policy on special & regular projects, I couldn’t continue to post work in progress content on the forum (those guidelines are what lead me to actually consider this route), but hopefully I’d still be able to post the completed profiles with artwork here. Additionally, all the stuff I’d produce would be 100% free and universally available – I’m just looking to offset the costs of dedicating time to making this stuff.

 

Copyright gets a bit tricky here – according to GW’s community guidelines this isn’t strictly viable, but that isn’t the same as meaning it’s not legally viable. Crowdfunding campaigns for GW IP-related projects already exist, and considering I’m already producing the rules and background at a slow pace in my own spare time, effectively this would be little different than commissioning an independent artist for the illustrations and formatting, which are practices that also exist.

 

I’d never reproduce rules that exist in published GW works - any PDFs would have directories of where to find referenced rules in their various publications, and I’d also make no copyright claims to any of the content.

 

I’ve also got concerns when it comes to my long-term ambition of joining the GW / FW design team – obviously this would likely jeopardise any chances of that happening, but when I consider how slim the chances of that happening are anyway, it’s a difficult call to make. I’ve already had one application turned down, and while I’d planned on applying again next year, I really don’t want to put my life on hold based on an unrealistic fantasy. Plus, let’s be honest – my real passion is for the Heresy, and FW don’t use concept artists, just miniature designers and illustrators.

 

Then I consider whether I even want to work for GW – I never got feedback from my rejected application, but part of me wonders whether the fact I explicitly stated my interest in GW’s attempts to increase the diversity in their range might have been an issue – every part of their careers process emphasises a ‘the company comes first’ mentality and its possible they read that as me being less likely to toe the line on moral issues. Then I consider reports of some stuff Tony Cottrell said at the last HH weekender and ask if I could ever justify working under someone who thinks it’s okay to spout that sort of horrendous garbage.

 

So I just want to explicitly say this is in no way a definite path I want to take. Even if I get an overwhelming amount of support for this idea, it’s entirely possible I’ll never go ahead with it – there’s lots of moving parts and provisos, so if this is something you don’t think is cool, that’s fine! I’m honestly mostly curious about whether people are interested enough in this to support it.

 

Crowdfunding:

 

I just wanted to set out in a bit more detail what me creating designs for 30k (and yeah, at first it’d only be 30k) might look like.

  • Firstly, the basic end-goal would be releasing PDFs of the unit rules I design. These would be styled after the very basic format of the downloadable rules from the FW website, and I’d make it explicitly obvious they’re unofficial.
  • These would include points costs so you could actually field them, background to situate them in the setting and high quality artwork to give a detailed visual overview of their appearance.
  • All this stuff would be entirely free to access & I’d try and format them to be as printer-friendly as possible
  • As I’ve currently got a decent back-catalogue, the first steps would likely be going through and releasing my existing designs, updating them as necessary, adding points costs and working from existing concept sketches
  • Moving on, if there was enough support I’d also be able to try more ambitious stuff: entirely new army lists for example (Legion auxilia anyone?), as well as stuff like dramatis persona in which I take background characters from the Heresy and give them rules and artwork (Lheor’s a perfect example here)
  • It might even give me a chance to branch out into other GW game systems, although with 40k and AoS featuring single-reference rulesheets, there might be some difficulty with not being able to repeat existing rules (again, I would *never* reproduce existing GW material – be it text or art)
  • In terms of backer / patreon rewards, I don’t want to produce exclusive content, because that goes against the whole point of this exercise, but I’m thinking stuff like a gated Discord channel where I’ll share work in progress rules / art so supporters could have more of an input on the creative process

Anyway, I’ve nattered on for long enough

 

Please let me know what you think – any concerns and input are welcome

 

And as always, thanks for keeping up interest in my various projects over the years

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Iron Hands Fanatic Venerable Brother

Iron Hands Fanatic

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For anyone curious, I'm still keen to investigate the Crowdfunding option, although at this point my main concern is whether there's enough interest to make it viable.


 


With that in mind, my next step will be producing a couple of 'proof of concept' PDFs to demonstrate the kind of work I'm talking about (plus, seeing how long they take wil help me break down what amount of content would be viable at different funding levels) - I'm currently pretty busy with my end of Masters project and setting up freelance infrastructure, but they'll be what I'm working on in the immediate future :happy.:


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  • 4 months later...
Iron Hands Fanatic Venerable Brother

Iron Hands Fanatic

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It's been a hot minute, but I've finally done some more forum-relevant portraiture - Lheorvine 'Firefist' Ukris, back in the days of the Heresy:

gallery_53779_8997_537054.jpg

I'm also now taking commissions for art like this for anyone interested!

No worries :smile.: I know you might have touched on it but I`m having a Monday moment :happy.: Will there be any 40k designs for Guard as two of my friends are avid guard players :biggrin.:

Sorry it's taken me so long to reply - I completely missed this. The only difficulty with doing designs for 40k stuff is that creating datasheets generally relies on repeating multiple rules that already exist, and I want to avoid plagiarising any content from existing publications. What I might end up doing is creating pared-down datasheets for 30k era designs that would likely persist to 40k (including Solar Auxilia / Imperial Militia stuff), with any content that would usually be repeated referenced instead - so you'd need those existing documents to assemble the full ruleset.

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Iron Hands Fanatic Venerable Brother

Iron Hands Fanatic

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The portrait is great! I love that cruel smile - really fitting for a character like Lheor.

 

Thanks - I'm still not sure about the shovel-bladed interpretation of the metal teeth, whether they should just be imitation teeth, but if I decide to colour this at a later point, that'd be a super easy thing to change 

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