John Blanche: a new beginning!

The Broken Road - John Blanche, 2016

After an illustrious career defining and shaping the world's of Games Workshop, John Blanche retired last week. It is impossible to overstate how important John was in helping Games Workshop become what it is today. His boundless creativity and vision has touched all aspects of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000, epitomizing the dark style that now defines it. For the three of us, his artwork literally brought us into the hobby. A large cardboard standee featuring the central Blood Angel Space Marine from John's cover for the 2nd edition of Warhammer 40,000 beckoned to us from the window of a local hobby shop. This led to us getting a few blister packs (we recently repainted one of the first trio of models we got from that very store) and eventually the 40k boxed game, and the rest was history. His evocative artwork kept us engaged in the hobby since that time, and his Blanchistsu articles in White Dwarf helped inspire us to push ourselves beyond what is featured on the box art and create our own sliver of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. To our continued amazement, this creative journey led us to the Inq28 movement and John Blanche himself, when we participated in Iron Sleet's Pilgrym event in 2016. When starting the hobby, we would have never imagined meeting John, let alone playing Warhammer 40k (or Mordheim!) with him. We feel incredibly blessed to count John as a friend, and want to wish him a wonderful retirement and are excited to see what he does next!

Dragged into Turbolasers Episode 68: Chatting with K03rnl

The many faces of K03rnl.

In this episode, we talk with Christof Keil, K03rnl on Instagram, a fantastic hobbyist that has made a name for himself by creating many fantastic and elaborative kitbashes. We talk about how he got into the hobby and how his interests shifted towards converting models with a Blanchitsu theme. We discuss his conversion process, talking about the tools he uses and how his profession as a blacksmith has influenced his work. We also converse about his experiences with live streaming and YouTube, as well his plans for Adepticon 2020, which include teaching a few classes!
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Dragged into Turbolasers Episode 52: What is Blanchitsu?

We are joined by our good friend Eli Parsons to discuss the rumor that White Dwarf magazine may no longer contain the John Blanche-themed hobby showcase articles, Blanchitsu. We talk about what we think Blanchitsu is to us, as well as what it represents for the hobby, including some of the reservations people have voiced about the feature. We also talk a little about how we got involved in creating models that were featured in Blanchitsu, and how others might go about creating models that represent their own personal visions of Games Workshop’s universes.

Warhammer Visions Review: A magazine for hobbyists

The new Warhammer Visions!

It has been years since I have had a subscription to Games Workshop’s monthly hobby magazine, White Dwarf. I have many fond memories of coming home from school and excitedly finding the next issue of White Dwarf waiting to be explored. I feel that the magazine played a critical role in driving my enthusiasm for the hobby during my early years, at times where I did not have the money to build armies, and times without the wellspring that is the internet.  The magazine offered countless pictures of painted models, including people's’ conversions (they even had pages at the back of each issue showing the parts of each new release to encourage conversions). Slowly however, White Dwarf shifted further and further away from the modeling and background centric focus, replacing the cool conversions and background stories with more advertisements. And eventually I stopped the subscription entirely. As many of you know, this scheme of releasing a monthly issue of White Dwarf was heavily modified over a year ago. Instead of releasing a single magazine, they shifted to releasing two magazines, a small weekly White Dwarf issue, and a larger monthly issue called Visions. While the smaller White Dwarf has been somewhat successful, having a good mix of both gaming and hobby content (including the rules for new releases), the larger picture-centered Visions has not received much attention or praise (I only purchased an issue or two). This month (May 2015) marks the release of a newly formatted Visions, with an increase in the size of the printed pages, back to the size of a standard magazine. I decided now would be a good time to give the magazine another chance and give my thoughts about it. Also, the cover of the magazine showed a battleline of Adeptus Mechanicus Skitarii, promising lots of high quality and detailed pictures of the new model range released by Games Workshop.