Greetings, Privateers! In this week’s concept art Insider, I’ll talk about the process of designing the Black Anchor exclusive, the Grymkin Slaughterhouse. For this particular concept, there was only one artist I thought would be perfect for the job: the always-amazing Andrea Uderzo! The description I sent to Andrea was:

This is a Grymkin Gargantuan warbeast. It’s a giant anthropomorphic haunted house in the vein of Monster House, where the structure itself has come alive. The doors become the gaping, toothy maw, torch alcoves for burning eyes, etc. Around its foundation can be a rolling avalanche of tombstones and coffins, but the locomotion is provided by dozens of arms reaching out of their graves and clawing on the ground to move the whole mass forward.

It has the appearance of a dreadful evil face, slowly moving toward you to eat everything in its path. There could be “cameos” by various types of Gremlins hiding around the house, peeking through broken bits of wood in a shattered window.

Andrea’s first round of sketches had us off to the races with some truly promising rough sketches.

With #2, I shrunk it down to demonstrate a mass decrease that could potentially work for that particular drawing. After staring at each of them for a while, my notes to the group were as follows:

• Build a small mound of dirt under the front to tilt it back a bit. Have the arms clawing forward out of the mound to help sell that they’re dragging the house forward. I did a little profile sketch next to 3b to show what I’m thinking. 
• Remove the fire. (Production note to decrease part count)
• Remove the inner spike coming out of the roof on its right (viewer’s left) side.  
• Add ivy to the side of the stonework like #2.
• Remove the branch protruding from the top (rear). 
• Shorten the chimney so the stacks are no taller than the building peak. 
• Cut the number of tombstones down to a max of 5 and have a couple of those lying flat in the proposed dirt mound. 

Everyone was in agreement with these adjustments, and production added that the fire could be kept and also said we could stack tombstones up against the front of the house like the left side of #1. There were also some issues with the peak of the house that were going to cause casting problems. With those notes in hand, Andrea sent me the following revisions.

My only remark was that I would scrub the little timber coming out of the rear of the house and the gremlin on the lower right should have his arm bent up against the house. Beyond that, we were all in agreement that this was ready to go to a final line art pass.

With all of those notes incorporated, we had a final!

This was a really fun concept to art direct, and as usual, Andrea did a killer job. I very much look forward to seeing them out in the wild. I hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into the concept art process for the Grymkin Slaughterhouse. If you’d like to pick this up for your WARMACHINE & HORDES games or to use it in your RPG campaign, you can purchase one here.