Eternal Crusade Promo Art: Warboss Skarblitz
Illustration © Games Workshop / BHVR
Special thanks to Creative Director David Ghosland, Art Director Ghislain Barbe and Producer Mathieu Fecteau and Narrative Designer Ivan Mulkeen 🙂
This guy was quite a doozy to put together, but I think well worth it in the end. Hope all you Orky fans out there are proud to have this guy as your warboss on Arkhona! Ivan and his initial team of writer-collaborators came up with the brief for an in-house creation, and although the brief evolved quite a bit, a few attributes were set pretty firmly at the beginning for me to design around:
– Has an extreme hate for Space Wolves…
– …which is represented by a number of Space Wolf trophies, most notably the salvaged Dreadnought Claw and a Cyber-wolf leg-turned melee weapon.
– One particular brief item that I thought was especially cool, was either Graham McNeill/Ivan Mulkeen wanted the wolf trophies to not be represented as celebrated items of pride but rather worn “desecrated” to bring across the spite Skarblitz harbours for the Space Wolves.
– This, alongside with their Bad Moonz affiliation inspired me to apply what I see as “desecrative” war paint, to hopefully drive across the point. Also to aesthetically find various excuses to balance out his busy getup.
– It was also decided later on that he be absolutely blinged up, which then spawned the numerous artefacts and trinkets looted over centuries of battle, one of my favourite is what I think of as a “chaos mandala” that was stamped right into the wolf-helmet’s snout, and a bit farther up on the wolf forehead, a jewel mount, sans jewel as an excuse for what I thought was an interesting fixture at the time.
– Enhanced Kustom Shoota, gold plated and Kustom bling ring with his initials engraved into it
