Tuesday 9 April 2013

John Blanche's early fantasy/scifi conversions

I'm a huge fan of the miniature artwork of John Blanche, and his Blanchitsu column in White Dwarf has kept me entertained and informed for many years. I continue to buy White Dwarf, and I've noticed that much of the focus in recent Blanchitsu has been on converting fantasy figures (or parts thereof) to scifi, often with an inquisitorial slant. This trait of converting fantasy figures to scifi is by no means new, and is something that John has been taking great delight in for decades. I recently had the opportunity to take some photographs of such figures in Bryan Ansell's collection. Figures 1 - 9 below all started life as early 1980's preslotta Citadel fantasy (OK, with a couple of exceptions). See how many you can spot (what I believe to be the answers can be found by clicking on the figure captions).

Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6 - not sure but I'm guessing one of these
Figure 7
Figure 8
Figure 9

As we are on the subject of converting old fantasy to scifi I thought I might as well post some similar stuff of John's from my own collection (those of you already familiar with my gallery of John Blanche figures may have seen these previously) - not just Citadel, but also Asgard, Ral Partha and RAFM:











4 comments:

  1. These are amazing! I have never seen such early conversions by Blanche. Thanks for posting these up!

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  2. Steve, on my computer's favourites list I am changing the name of your site to Nirvana! I am so blissed out right now staring at these wonders! If you ever decide to make a line of T-shirts with these minis on them, please put me down for all! Especially for picture number 12!! Thanks again for sharing your photos!

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  3. He truly is the master isn't he!

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  4. This is absolutely great! Thanks for sharing Steve.

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