Black Library: Pandorax
This piece was done in April this year before I flew to attend the amazing Middle East Film and Comiccon, and I suppose at the time, was the most complex and stressful image that I had been commissioned by the Black Library to illustrate. The variety of colourful and famous characters, interpretive detail (based on the minis) and ‘wrap around’ composition made it quite a doozy to put together. Nonetheless I learnt a lot from it and had a really fun time ‘reconfiguring/retweaking’ their power armour and trying out various treatments, both aesthetic and textural, to make it more practical for me to produce this image on time and in the same breath try to bring out each character’s ‘essence’ a bit clearer.
Here’s a interesting side story of mine to go with this image and why Azrael in particular was pretty ‘stressful’ for me to illustrate.
Getting Azrael feeling right had me looking through so many artists’ interpretations of him, one of my favourite being a Paul Dainton’s and a cool detail on a Raymond Swanland image that had an imperial eagle tattooed on the side of his head – in a long winding creative converging of ideas which resulted in the claw marks you see now.
Hope the Grey Knight fans out there like Lord Draigo shiny!
Also… dual feed bolter gauntlet for Abbadon. FCK YEA CHAOS
Check out the e/book here!
Illustration © Games Workshop
Art director/producer: Karen Miksza
Special thanks to Michael Haugen Wieske, German Language Production Editor for his reference help
