PAUL BONNER

The mind-bogglingly detailed illustrations of Paul Bonner had a huge inpact on me as a young whelp. Especially the ones that depict greenskins of all kinds as they´ve always been the warhammer race closest to my heart.

These are images that tell stories - instead of just showing a bunch of bellowing monsters with explosions in the background they often focus on ork life outside (or just to the side) of the theatre of war. 
Images bursting at the seams with character and that special wry sense of humour that have always made the orkoids so dear to me. 

They really emphasise that orks aren´t simply bloodthirsty killing machines - there´s a philosophical streak to them. They certainly do love war, but what they primarily enjoy is the spectacle of warfare - the exhilarating adventure of fighting, the smoke belching roar of giant machines (and just generally causing mayhem) - rather than being into it for the sake of slaughtering people. There´s a difference between liking a"good scrap" and liking killing... 



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All images are © copyright Games Workshop



3 comments:

  1. You HAD to sneak in some of his Squat art, didn't you? Sigh... I was collecting a huge army of 40K Orks at the time (a good part of my love for greenskins stemmed from Paul Bonner's art, actually), and was so very close to starting a Squat army just before they wrote them out of 40K canon.

    Now I think I'll just have to settle for sneaking one into the retinue of my radical Xenos Inquisitor one day...

    Paul Bonner will always be one of the GW greats, in my opinion. So very characterful, with such expressive faces.

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  2. One of my favorite 40k artists alongside Gary Harrod. I wanted to do a feature on him for my blog but whenever I scanned the drawing I lost so much of the amazing pencil work I gave it up. Nice to see you got some of of that detail.

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