WAAAGHHhhh... Oh Hey, excuse me ahem… my inner ork is showing!
My name is Josh. It's great to e-meet ya and 25 years ago I started on a journey that would forever change my life.
The journey starts with 14 year old Josh meeting an Outrider at a local game store showing off the new Warhammer 40k 3rd edition. Outrider Jon found out that we were both adopted so he naturally took me under his wing a bit more to show me how to build, paint and little did I know, ultimately inspiring me to becoming a great artist. I was able to scratch build a 1500 point ork speed freak army based on the new 40k Armageddon Codex that came entirely from Outrider Jons bitsbox, he still to this day doesn’t let that go, haha. I quickly learned that to become great I needed time behind the paintbrush. I spent a year painting that speed freek army before winning an RTT best painted army award plaque while wearing my own custom speed freek t-shirt I made that said “Drive it like yoo stole it, WAAAAAAAGH!”. It was and is still one of my most memorable Warhammer moments winning that award.
I was always glued to Wayne England and John Blanche’s art in White Dwarf magazine, posters and books. I redrew Wayne’s ork and gobbo faces on everything from school papers to graffiti on friends' Space Marine tanks haha, I was learning from the best and had no idea. I continued to do Warhammer but I started to drift more into drawing and painting space marines and orks throughout highschool. It was then I decided to become a real life Marine, I joined the US Marines! I continued to have an unquenchable thirst for creativity, painting miniatures, drawing, painting murals when I could. When my enlistment was over, I decided to pursue art college. This is when Warhammer became a huge part of my life for the second time. I built another ork army, this time around it was based on the Badmoon clan. It was a beautiful army, with so many conversions and forgeworld models. I won best painted and players choice at every event for about 2 years with that ork army in Southern California. While in college, my art style started to form.
The artistic influence that Warhammer had on me from the Imperial guard Catachan Codex to Wayne England’s White Dwarf covers and of course those wacky orks. It all helped define my artistic choices, in turn helped me establish my fun art style. That same style then landed my first job as a concept artist working on Heroes of Newerth designing characters. The portfolio of characters led me to Hasbro where I got to work on my very first orc as a professional artist! This came about through working on Dungeons and Dragons, which is my second favorite fantasy world. While working at Hasbro, I was able to step out of just being a concept artist. I helped game design tackle challenging problems via artistic creative solutions. My critical thinking and problem solving started to get strong like Hulk. I got to work on many projects while at Hasbro, ultimately they closed the mobile studio I was at.
Accepting a new job out in sunny California working on a high fantasy mobile game. Unfortunately there were no orcs to be created, a sad day. However, I got to focus on something else and that was working with other departments to collectively crush our goals as a business. I really took to learning how to blend artistic choices but also understood the return on investment as dev time was very short to find a solid pacing. I was promoted to senior artist and a bit after to lead artist for those efforts. Part of our process was to brainstorm features that would excite our players, so design and art were inseparable. I led many features to which we followed through and watched go live, to absolutely crush it on release day. This really instilled the ideology in my process of creation, how can we blow the socks off the person holding what you’ve made. During this time I was contacted by someone who worked at Blizzard on the game Hearthstone. They mentioned they loved my material renderings and my orks I had painted and asked if I was interested in doing any illustration work. By the time I knew it, I had photoshop spilling at the edges with orcs, monsters, weapons for card art within Hearthstone. This was the best thing outside of working on 40k orks! Those freelance card art illustrations led me to working full time on the Blizzard campus.
Working on the many expansions for Hearthstone, one of the most fun was creating concepts that were based on keeping true to the original IP Warcraft, but also pushing the boundaries on how we could bring more people in to love it through fun pop culture visual themes! So we got to come up with some really fun ideas via brainstorming meetings and end up with a million napkin sketches. I helped the design and live ops teams reduce art complete times on low engaging features, which freed up time to invest on getting ahead in concepts for future expansions and features. I ended up leaving Blizzard with a few other artists to join a startup and really hone into creating a fun culture while creating an all new exciting product that was not a game. Although the app we were making had no fantasy characters in it, I did get to work with and learn about huge brands such as the NBA, MLS, LCS and La Liga. Learning how to work with such massive brands was a challenge that was very rewarding both skillset and excitement wise. I had the privilege to mentor our junior artists (just as it had happened to me when I was young, I was able to pass it down) who are now out in the game industry slaying those pixels as senior concept artists. Supporting the art team as a lead and then associate art director on our app has really solidified my holistic approach to development on a product, it's a delicate balance of creative freedom, technical specs and then the business side. Unfortunately money became tight and they had to lay off the entire creative team, including myself. With that I decided to take a vacation of just getting back to my roots and painting some Warhammer miniatures and oh boy has it been fun. You can check them out in my portfolio linked!
Throughout my career I have sharpened my artistic blades on character concepts, thoughtful design meetings, 3D models on some really amazing teams! All of that was in preparation to allow me to confidently knock on the giant metal door of the Warhammer universe. Warhammer is such a pillar of my life as an artist, I want to give the same inspiration back to the new generation through our amazing stories and plastic miniatures as it did for me.
Warhammer gave me a purpose, I took that purpose and forged an artistic career from it, in turn has created my self identity of who I am as an artist and human.
Thank you,
Josh