Welcome to the Original Oldhammer Artwork blog

Hi and welcome,

Firstly thank you for showing and sharing an interest in my passion.

I thought I’d share a little about myself before I froth about Oldhammer art work.

Like many of you I was drawn to Warhammer for various reasons. I can clearly remember the first time I saw a Citadel Miniature, a Cyclopes brought into school by a friend. I can recall the first miniature, a C04 thief, I bought in a toy shop in Glossop Derbyshire. Again, I can recall with singular clarity my first visit to Games Workshop in Manchester in 1984. It was the first time my parents had allowed my to travel to the city by myself. That visit had a profound impact on my life. It’s where I met my life long friends of nearly 40 years, we still see each other on a regular basis. It’s fair to say Warhammer has had a big impact on my life.

I was diagnosed with High functioning Autism and Aspergers as a mature student at University. Growing up I knew I was always different from others around me with the exception of my friends who funnily enough all score on the autism spectrum. I was never interested in the popular. Whilst my peers were discovering music, fashion and each other I was happy learning about 10th century medieval church law, I know wtf, and collecting and painting miniatures and trying to make sense of the rules having Dyslexia. The Warhammer narrative was also unaccessible because of my condition.

However, the black and white ink illustrations and coloured oil and water colour artwork brought the world to vivid life. I pawed over them for hours and hours. At the time, I hadn’t realised but the art was mentally relaxing me and turning off the ‘chatter’ an HFA person might experience. Essentially I am a problem solver, the more complex and multi layered the issue I will resolve it. Unfortunately, I can’t stop until I resolve the issue.

The realisation that the art was a key to attain some balance in my life set me on my latest adventure down the rabbit hole. Armed with my Autism super abilities I set out to acquire some original artwork. Since the birth of social platforms and the creation of Warhammer fan groups I noticed posts where private individuals had bought, usually through auction, directly contacting the artist or that it had been gifted to them by the artist. On some occasions individuals had saved art literally from the skip.

I assumed, wrongly, that most of the artwork was in the hands of Games Workshop, in private collections or had been lost over time. I thought the artists had all been approached a long time ago and was a dried out source, boy was I wrong on that.

At the time I decided to invest time, resource and energy into this new dimension of the hobby a new group appeared on FB called Original Games Workshop Art. This assured me that there were others out there with the same passion and goal that it was still possible to acquire the holy of hollies of Games Workshop art. I learnt a lot very quickly about the etiquette of contacting an artist directly. Collecting the original art as you can imagine is not the cheapest aspect of the hobby as you are literally buying the sole of an artist who has looked after the art for 30+ years.

One of my biggest fears was upsetting the artist about assigning a monetary value to their work. It can be tricky but managed with sensitivity and understanding it can be done. Artists like Mark Gibbons are very used to dealing with requests for artwork and has a great process in place. Some simply don’t have the time to respond as they are busy. In one case a legendary artist took an interest in my personal posts on a Facebook and overtime we developed enough of a relationship where he took time out of his busy schedule to go through his collection of work, that moment was like finding the grail.

In the up coming days and weeks I will add more and more content. I hope you enjoy it.

Any how that’s enough about me for now...