GW Artifacts, (An occasional series): Some unpublished artwork.

So, this is something I'm pretty certain no one has seen for thirty years. I recently found them whilst going through some old paperwork and thought you guys might be interested in seeing them.

When I started at GW I was in Mail Order up on Chewton Street in Eastwood, and at some point in my tenure it was decided that all of the Mail Order Trolls would get individual packing slips. As part of that, we were all shipped off to the studio to be drawn by one of the studio artists, and these are the results:

Top Row L-R:  Dan, Jon, ?. Bottom Row: ?, Mike?, Conrad, Dave?

I'm guessing by the style that they were drawn by Carl Critchlow, but it was that long ago I'm afraid my memory is rather fuzzy in that regard. Also, rather more unfortunately, my caricature was done later, and I can't for the life of me find the paperwork with mine on, so it may have been consigned to the dustbin of history long ago. These were my Mail order compatriots at the time, but also due to my imperfect memory I can no longer remember half of the names.

more info after the cut...

A little Games Workshop history...

Here's a bit of a rarity I've picked up recently, a small part of GW history all the way back from when I was working there. It's a rather hefty Terminator shoulder pad belt buckle, in solid brass, and not to be confused with the much more recent 'Bulldog Buckles' pot-metal crap.

Raiders of the Lost Skip!

Something different, a bit of history for you, this time!

There's been some discussion recently on the rather awesome http://realmofchaos80s.blogspot.co.uk blog about the rather sad fate of a whole lot of unique artwork and goodies that were trashed in the the move of the design studio from Enfield Chambers to Castle Boulevard in about 1991. Specifically, in the comments, here.

I was in the (un)fortunate position of being a Mail Order Troll back in the day. We basically got all the menial jobs that the artistic talent didn't want to do, and the casters were too ham-fisted to do. During the move, a bunch of us got tasked into box-moving, van-driving and assorted manual labour, shuttling boxes of stuff between buildings. At the end of the move, there was an empty, sad looking former design studio, and a rather large and full skip sat outside it. With us trolls being a rather feral lot, we obtained permission from management to go and rifle through said skip, with a view to nabbing off with some goodies. Remember, this is years before eBay, we just wanted unreleased stuff and figures for gaming, rather than going through it with an eye for profit.

Tragically, as it had rained, most, if not all of the artwork in there, from *all* of the major GW artists at the time, not just Gary's work, was ruined, but in amongst the banana peels, broken furniture and lots of empty beer cans (I kid you not!) were a few gems. One of them was this:

Which, the *very* astute of you might notice, is some of the scenery from the now legendary Realms of Chaos 'Slaves To Darkness' Book.

In fact, if you look closely, you can spot it on the far left of this pic, from the StD book:

Originally, my manager at the time said he believed it was made by John Blanche, but after some research, it's looking more like it was made by Jamie Sims. Either way, it's a great little piece.

The box actually contained all of the scenery featured in the book, just tossed away, unwanted. I managed to rescue it, pretty much undamaged, and used it in many a battle, until I left the hobby.

In a complete fit of idiocy sold my entire collection in the late 90's, when I was rather short of money and needed to buy a house. These last two bits were in a box that got missed, and are now on display at home.

Of course, if I'd waited for the age of eBay, I could have probably purchased a much larger house, as my collection contained vast amounts of rare and unreleased lead. I've since spent the last decade or so glued to eBay, paying stupid amounts of money for things I used to own.

Ah well!