Personal thoughts on the death of John Blanche

The great former Games Workshop art director has passed. He's been an immense inspiration to me since I first got into warhammer aged around 7 - and I still remember how excited I was to find his (very different, earlier, less chaotic) art in my father's battered old copy of David Day's Tolkein Bestiary. 

 I tried to imitate his styles in my GCSE art projects, with the merciful support of my teachers; I think as a dyspraxic child who loved drawing but couldn't really be neat, seeing the wild exubrance of his penwork and watercolours might have been one of the main things inspiring me to keep trying. 

Strategically cropping some of the more embarrassing bits

It'd be some years until I realized just how much control and skill, developed in his fine art schooling, really did go into that work - but by then he'd retired from Games Workshop, producing the Voodoo artbooks as he (if interviews are to be believed) struggled with declining co-ordination, and the relatability was back. My copy of Voodoo Forest used its almost-blank right pages as a journal/scrapbook for a while, so close did I feel to this moody artwork trembling with frantic energy.

Meanwhile, the way he's played games was equally transformative. The whole conversion and homebrew movement around Blanchitsu has produced a lot of stuff that's a little too rules-lite for my tastes, but its punky DIY ethos is what I try to carry into every hack or system I make, as he did in his concept work for GW projects like Dreadfleet or the 8th edition of WHFB. The modelling side of it, meanwhile, is what I'll always aspire to. Mud, blood, shit, and weird tentacular arms. 

Some favourite home-made gribblies

I suspect that in a lot of ways he was a check on some of the homogenizing, commercializing forces within GW's culture, like if all the storyboards for the MCU had been made by the creators of 80s underground zines. Doesn't mean he was a magic talisman against it, of course, nor that it's all downhill from here; there are doubtless things to be gained through changes, but one does rather suspect that some of the stylistic elements that make Oldhammer and Midhammer so cool have been slipping further away without him, at least from the 'official' GW content. You can still find them in venues like 28 mag, but alas that doesn't have quite the same reach. It'd be worth everyone who believes in the DIY ethos within gaming reaffirming and strengthening that commitment now, to keep that flame burning.

There will be better eulogies, but I still wanted to contribute to them. Inevitably, when great people die, my thoughts turn to how they've touched me. I hope it's not selfish; I like to think of it as the ripples of their passage, spreading out over the swirling waters of existence. 'No man dies while his name is spoken', or something like that. 

'Unto the deid goes all Estatis'. RIP John Blanche.

His self-portrait