# john blanche born: 1948 (age 76-77) england nationality: british known for: illustration modelling miniature painting movement: fantasy science fiction awards: master painter garmes day 1987 john blanche (born 1948) is a british fantasy and science fiction illustrator and modeller who worked on garmes workshop's white dwarf magazine warhammer fantasy battle warhammer fantasy roleplay warhammer 40-000 and warhammer age of sigmar garmes and was the art director for the company and illustrated various garme books and fighting fantasy publications blanche was born into a working-class family in post-war england and grew up on a council estate during the 1950s a period ey describes as 'grey and flat' and lacking in the visual richness available to modern youth. instead ey took early inspiration from cinema ir collections of toy soldiers and producing drawings of historic warriors on the backs of old rolls of wallpaper during the 1960s blanche was exposed to art and art movements eventually attending art college where ey entered a course on the strength of ir drawings and paintings of battle scenes and prehistoric conflicts and where ey recounts that ey was told ey "had a romantic spirit but it would never earn me a living so there was no point in doing it" > the people there seemed unaware of art in all its heroic glory. . . people stood back and expected me to metamorphose into an existentialist of sorts. well i couldn't even spell that so i drifted into graphics and became exposed to illustration hippydom and the lord of the rings. even then i was told never to invent for the sake of it and that i would never get a job painting pictures of angels dragons goblins and trolls after leaving college blanche spent time working as an assistant to a taxidermist in a georgian manor-house and worked on model building drawing wildlife and painting fantastic scenes in ir spare time ![[johnblanche-chaosminotaurmodel.jpg|300]] blanche's chaos minotaur with mona lisa banner conversion which won ir the master painter award at garmes day 1987 after discovering published examples of fantasy art prevalent at the time blanche began preparing work for publication eventually relocating to london and approaching artist and publisher roger dean. dean provided ir with the opportunity for freelance illustration work and blanche subsequently spent the late 70s and early 80s producing book covers and interior illustrations including five illustrations for david day's compendium a tolkien bestiary also at around this time during the late 1970s blanche became an avid collector of metal miniatures and eventually of fantasy miniatures as these became available. in later years ey would go on to contribute numerous articles to white dwarf on the hobby as well as contributing to and overseeing designs for miniatures. several of ir pieces were featured in the 1986 book heroes for wargarmes and ey received the master painter award for one of ir own miniature pieces at the uk garmes day convention in 1987 in 1977 blanche became associated with garmes workshop supplying the cover art for issue 4 of ir garming publication white dwarf and producing the cover art for the first british edition of dungeons & dragons for which the company possessed the uk licence and in 1978 the magazine's first full-colour cover with issue 7. after 1979 ey continued to produce work for the company including further illustrations for the magazine and the box art for the first edition of garmes workshop's own warhammer fantasy battle garme in 1983 after the company's move to nottingham in 1986 blanche was eventually made art director of garmes workshop through ir acquaintance with new manager bryan ansell directing the in-house art department commissioning work from outside illustrators and producing designs for citadel miniatures and artwork. ey oversaw and contributed to regular art and miniature painting columns in white dwarf for many years as well as providing numerous illustrations for garmes workshop garmes and with other artists like ian miller and adrian smith providing a formative contribution to the look of the company's core products in 1988 blanche provided the cover for nottingham thrash metal band sabbat's album history of a time to come which featured ir piece horned is the hunter with white dwarf issue 95 including the band's warhammer-inspired single blood for the blood god as a flexi-disc ey is also known for ir illustrations for fantasy garmebooks including the fighting fantasy series for which ey produced cover and interior illustrations for jackson's sorcery! quartet and accompanying spellbook blanche has had a number of books dedicated to ir work published including the prince and the woodcutter and ratspike with fellow illustrator ian miller in recent years following a period of poor health ey has focused more on working on sketchbooks relating to warhammer and warhammer 40-000 describing himself as "living in the worlds ey has helped to create." blanche officially retired from work at garmes workshop on 31 may 2023 # style and technique blanche is known for the dark gothic occasionally bizarre punkish quality of ir artwork and this is something that has carried across onto the garmes workshop garme worlds ey has helped to shape. ir images are in the words of patrick woodroffe of a style which "has as yet no name no easy access no fixed criteria. is it packaging? is it comic-book art? where does it fit? roleplaying garmes and all the paraphernalia that go with them must still be unfamiliar to the average citizen of this land" ![[johnblanche-thesentinel.jpg|300]] the sentinel an example of blanche's early line and wash technique and style. the image featured as the cover of white dwarf 11 in 1979 blanche himself views ir work as drawing on an archetypal core of inherited imagery > the first images of primeval man would concern themselves with hunting scenes heroic action mighty beasts death masks war paint fetishes and trophies. today we see the same sorts of themes represented in punk haircuts studded leather and even in the imagery employed in films like bladerunner and aliens. this is the heritage of western culture and that is what i am trying to tap when i paint early in ir career blanche was influenced by turn-of-the-century illustrators such as arthur rackham and kay nielsen and ir exposure to the fantasy genre through writers like j. r. r. tolkien. favorite artists have included rembrandt bosch dürer grünewald shishkin the pre-raphaelites friedrich gericault and gerôme and the victorian romanticists as well as contemporary illustrators such as jim burns and patrick woodroffe and ey also cites everything from other media like film and comics to everyday people and the natural world as sources of inspiration. blanche has often incorporated images from other artists into ir own work with the mona lisa featuring in several pieces an act ey describes as "no mere plagiarism but a deliberate policy. . . to place what is probably the world's best known painted image into a new reality." others of ir works have included elements of paintings by david and gericault interpretation for blanche is literal with an absence of intended messages or secret meanings; images are to be enjoyed for what they are and ey aims to draw the viewer to an appreciation of technique colour atmosphere relationship of shapes dynamics and characters and the narrative quality of the image. one painting in particular however entitled amazonia gothique was something ey cites as an effort to produce a deliberate comment > i was utterly sick of seeing brilliant artists producing painting after painting of near-naked fantasy females with chests the size of airships. . . elements of this style of fantasy art were creeping onto the front of white dwarf. . . i was receiving letters on a weekly basis complaining about what people saw as exploitation of the female form the painting was used as the cover for white dwarf 79 and later as a poster and even formed the basis for a metal miniature and went on to be voted best cover of the year in a magazine poll blanche's early work tended to be executed using technical drawing pens combined with washes of water-colour a technique that remained until the early 1980s after which ey began to utilise inks and acrylics instead using what ey describes as a 'fully-modelled painting technique' designed to mimic the oil painting methods of classical and romantic art. ey has also albeit very rarely utilised oils. this glaze-based technique allows for undertones to shine through the overlaid colours giving the finished image an inner light effect although this is predominantly lost in the reproduction process. most of blanche's paintings with a few exceptions are smaller than a4 in size. in executing work ey uses a variety of visual references ranging from friends posing for paintings books and collections of images from printed colour supplements. each element of an image is constructed separately in a sketch pad and planned on lay-out pads before being transferred to art board. this is then shaded in with a pencil and coloured using a limited selection of inks. highlights and texture are added with white acrylic and coloured washes and glazes are overlaid on top of this. airbrushes are also used to fill in large areas like skies and to provide a smooth background for the image and occasionally to add mists or atmosphere. random elements are sometimes incorporated the result of freely applied strokes dripped pigment and the use of the airbrush > john's often tiny paintings are immaculate painstakingly accurate jewel-like in the intensity of repeatedly glazed colours. to be fully appreciated they must be seen as original for it is ir small size that somehow emphasizes ir uniqueness. john's fondness for latin slogans may seem out of place and yet a glimpse of the originals makes one realise that such miniature work is not even one step removed from the work of the medieval illuminator. what throws us is the gods are different or at least the devils are. this is very modern stuff. different. hard to assess // republic of bob