Saturday, May 23, 2020

Fantasy Pirate Portraits

Whenever I go through my old sketchbooks and stacks of loose bits of paper I find a whole heap of ideas, concepts, and scribbles that I want to revisit.
Be it that it's just a cool idea that I'm dying to use for something, a concept that merits further exploration, or a quick scribble that has the potential to turn into a proper piece of artwork.
That's exactly how these Fantasy Pirate Portraits came to be.

Fantasy Pirate Portraits I. – Bretonnian Buccaneer
Fantasy Pirate Portraits I. – Bretonnian Buccaneer 

All three of these started out as quick and rough concept sketches in one of my many sketchbooks. Inspired, at the time, by Games Workshop's tabletop game Dreadfleet.
I started thinking up pirate characters from different parts of the (old) Warhammer World and what they would look like, for something like a fan-made Dreadfleet Expansion Project. I thought up some ships for some of them as well, but that's a story for another post.

Fantasy Pirate Portraits II. – Privateer of Marienburg
Fantasy Pirate Portraits II. – Privateer of Marienburg

Recently, as I was entering another pirate-phase and working on another naval-themed gaming project, I came across them again and felt all inspired to paint them. I really wanted to keep the roughness of the original drawings, so it also became an exercise in doing a quick and dirty paint job and trying a more loose painting technique on them. Needless to say, I still got carried away again in certain parts, but I managed to get them done fairly quickly.

Fantasy Pirate Portraits III. – Female Pirate Captain

Seeing how I still have loads more of these kinds of sketches floating about my studio, I'm hoping to do a lot more of these in the future. At some point I also want to talk about more about the above mentioned Dreadfleet Expansion Project, although that may be a while yet. One of my many (very) longterm hobby projects.
I'm also currently working to get a little pirate miniatures project off the ground, based on similar concepts to the above. There's no set timeline yet, but as soon as there's any news I'll let you know here on this blog and on social media.