David Gallagher's Art Brought Warhammer 40K and Fantasy to Life

                                                                  Games Workshop (Inquis Exterminatus)

 

David Gallagher is just one of the latest great artists to part ways with Games Workshop, the company responsible for the iconic wargames Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer Fantasy, and their countless other offshoots. Those games owed much of their success to their compelling, dark settings, which were fleshed out by the stunning, unique work provided by dozens of artists. David Gallagher did art for Games Workshop since the earliest editions of both Warhammer systems and left a lasting impact on each one. Games Workshop has never had a shortage of talented artists, but Gallagher offered a human image of distinctly dehumanized settings, presenting work at a level that few other tabletop game artists have managed.

As fond as I am of Warhammer in both its iterations, I’ll admit the art can blend together. It’s gothic, oppressive visions of hostile worlds lends itself to a certain level of monotony. The increasing focus on depicting the miniature kits sold by Games Workshop didn’t help matters, especially when it came to variety. This approach did give Warhammer some much needed consistency, as the settings managed to establish themselves with their signature rough, harsh artwork. Gallagher’s pieces stood out from this paradigm with his more organic, softer designs and a middle ground between the more realistic and abstract styles of his Warhammer peers.
This put his work in a position where it could justify the stranger design choices, like the massive shoulder pads and penchant for skulls. But it still retained some sense of realism, at least compared to the other artists. Gallagher’s art captured the essence of those dark, militarized universes, while leaving his own mark.

Gallagher’s work with Warhammer also preserves the playfulness that characterized early Warhammer, while still keeping it in line with the grimmer tone of later iterations. Many of his smaller works would present the disturbing aesthetic of the setting in a light hearted but nonetheless foreboding way. A great example are the filler pieces that populate the 6^th edition Warhammer 40,000 rulebook, in which robed, cherub faced servants toiled about in amusing ways. These pieces were the right mix of goofy and grim, capturing the original, long neglected tone of Warhammer’s settings. The characters clearly took themselves seriously but that gave them a sense of pomp that complemented both settings’ over the top natures. Gallagher’s work carried some much needed self-awareness, embracing the absurdity inherent to the games that coined the term “grimdark.”

While most of his characters had the usual scowl that’s a trademark of Warhammer art, some would take on a more bewildered look. The fearful, perturbed, or just cross individuals that populated his Warhammer art instilled a sense that people had clung to some humanity even in such hopeless, exaggerated situations. In one of his pieces, space suited explorers make their way into an abandoned laboratory, fearfully looking around at their unseen discoveries while clutching various tools. While not immune to Warhammer’s penchant for similar faces, there was more variety in Gallagher’s art. It provided some much needed emotion into the mix. These additions just made the monstrous parts even starker, as it broke up the monotony of horror a lot of Warhammer media falls victim to.

Similar figures populate nearly all of Gallagher's works. His heroes, whether they be fighting in the far future or the forests of the Old World, were rarely unaccompanied. Hooded figures always trailed behind them, as did scribes, bodyguards, aids, and the like. One of his most comprehensive pieces was from the last edition of Space Hulk, in which dozens of chapter serfs labor to help a single space marine put on his hulking terminator armor. Warhammer 40K and Fantasy are as far as you can get from realism but Gallagher’s emphasis on the smaller things made it believable. His art offered a glimpse of a comprehensive world through details like that and just one of the ways in which it did more than just sell miniatures.

Despite the uniquely personal approach in Gallagher’s Warhammer art he remains to be one of the few to capture its legendary sense of scale. Gallagher’s backgrounds are dominated by titanic, continent shattering battles and his sprawling battle scenes captured the breadth and weight that should have. Impossibly tall cities, massive battleships, and seemingly endless armies helped convey this. But even more impressively, it kept a sense of personality to it. Individual combatants could still grab attention without taking too much away from the battle as a whole. The opposite proved true, as even the most impressive sights never overshadowed the footsoldiers. There was a reason he ended up doing most of the starter set box art. Gallagher would also throw in strange machines, creatures, and structures that could never be a miniature. Gallagher captured Warhammer’s beloved but unwieldy scale in a uniquely functional way.

Gallagher’s Warhammer work also displayed subtlety, at least compared to its peers. His art doesn’t just mindlessly display the subject but creates little vignettes around them. His work always conveyed a sense of motion in a genre dominated by stiff figures. In a lot of pieces I mentioned, what lies just out of sight matters just as much as what’s shown. The visible characters reactions helped create the sense of a larger piece without cluttering the scene. That’s a big part of why his large battles work so well, as he focuses on a piece of the action and uses that to imply something greater is happening around it. His reliance on watercolors also helped distinguish his work, especially as tabletop game visuals have become increasingly dominated by digital art that is technically impressive but lacks a lot of the heart of what came before it. Gallagher's own digital art draws a comfortable middle ground between those modern and traditional styles.

Gallagher’s Warhammer art still suffered a lot of the issues you find in tabletop game art and adjacent media. But his unique approach avoided or at least downplayed most of its worst qualities. As he starts to post more of his own art, it seems that the problematic aspects were often not his idea in the first place. Gallagher’s work fleshed out the various media under the Warhammer label and in a way that made it feel like they were living, functional places and not just backdrops for model kits. He also did much of the concept art for many of Games Workshop’s iconic miniatures and licensed media. It’s a shame that the settings Gallagher played such a big part in building will be deprived of his vision going forward. But David Gallagher will now be focusing on his own work, which should be promising indeed. You can follow him on instagram here.