John Blanche, one of the joint creators of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 and the animating force of the grimdark art style, has died. Trish Carden, a friend of Blanche who worked as a sculptor with him at Games Workshop, broke the news in her Facebook group on Wednesday. Carden’s post states that “John Blanche’s wife Lin has asked me to let you all know that John passed away a couple of days ago”, and that “the family will say goodbye to John privately but there will be a get together in the future for everyone to celebrate John’s life”.
Born in 1948 in post-war Britain, Blanche’s early career was as a freelance illustrator, producing covers and illustrations for SF/F books and magazines. His first contract for Games Workshop was the cover art for issue four of White Dwarf magazine in 1977, and he became a regular cover artist, including for the first edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle in 1983.
Blanche was also a talented sculptor, and in 1982 he contributed sculpts to the Creatures of Chaos range produced by Asgard Miniatures. Asgard was owned by Bryan Ansell, the man who original GW founders Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone brought on to manage the in-house Citadel miniatures range for GW. After GW moved in 1986 from its initial headquarters in London to new premises, first in Newark and then Nottingham, and Bryan Ansell took on the role of general manager, Blanche was appointed as the studio’s art director.
Blanche’s influence on the development of all Warhammer products was both directorial and hands-on. He was the art director and a contributor to the original Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader rulebook in 1987. In 1993, as print deadlines for the second edition of Warhammer 40k loomed and large amounts of interior art were missing, Blanche rushed out a huge quantity at speed, in addition to the considerable contributions he’d already made – an iconic color painting of Blood Angels Space Marines fighting Orks for the box cover, illustrations of the Eternity Gate and Golden Throne of Terra, and more.
Blanche was an artistic counterbalance to Jes Goodwin, another fellow import from Asgard Miniatures who worked first as a Citadel sculptor before becoming the head of the model design studio. Where Goodwin’s work is so precise and measured that illustrations he drew in the 1990s have been turned into new models in the 2020s, Blanche’s work is expressionistic, energetic, frenzied, a riot of impressions and ideas. Though a skilled painter, he favored pen and ink, and his palette notoriously avoided the color blue – an aversion based on its tendency to fade over time.
The style that Blanche pioneered is now called ‘grimdark‘ or sometimes ‘gothic sci-fi‘, and it certainly has gothic narrative themes of an unquiet past haunting the present. He tended to refer to it as ‘baroque’. Blanche drew equal inspiration from contemporary punk fashion, pop culture, the painters of the northern Renaissance such as Dührer and Rembrandt, the pre-Raphaelites, military artists, and more.
As well as directly shaping the largest mainstream miniature wargames as an art director, Blanche was a pivotal figure in Inq28, wargaming’s contemporary indie scene. In the ’00s Blanche joined a loose collective of creatives making customized warbands for single-day, narrative heavy, ultra-high effort skirmish wargames.
Photos of warbands from these games were then published in White Dwarf magazine in the Blanchitsu column. This helped to advertise the nascent indie scene while popularizing its grimdark aesthetic – from this foundation emerged 28 Magazine, indie games such as Turnip28, and even the online social framework that enabled Trench Crusade to become a mega-hit.
Blanche retired from Games Workshop in June 2023, but continued working in the tabletop gaming space. His final art project was Voodoo Forest, a series of linked pen and ink illustrations exploring an ethereal, surreal woodland. His last contribution to a tabletop game was to design the characters for En Garde, a one-vs-one duelling game with rules by his former colleague Tuomas Pirinen and miniatures in the large 54mm scale, one of Blanche’s personal favorites.
I had a reason to interview Blanche when he retired, but he was both uncomfortable with video conferencing and affected by a chronic illness, and I decided that – for all I wanted to speak to a legend who had so shaped my life – I had better leave him in peace. I’m grateful to the many excellent interviews with Blanche that are available, including in the documentary The Grim & the Dark, and YouTube videos by Filmdeg Miniatures and Jordan Sorcery.
To be updated on how Blanche’s family would like to receive condolences, messages or tributes for him, you can check out Trish Carden’s Facebook announcement and follow her excellent Miniatures & Design group here.
If you want to share your favorite piece of John Blanche art, an anecdote about the great man, or simply celebrate his extraordinary life and work with us, please come and join us in the Wargamer Discord community.
Source: Wargamer
