Hey folks! You may well have spotted this on your hobby-focussed YouTube by now, but if you haven’t, I made an appearance on The Painting Phase hobby chat show with Peachy, Geoff and Pat. We talked about my role as Commissioning Editor for Games Workshop (which I left a couple of years back), Blanchitsu, Necromunda, Blood Bowl, and my podcast – My Life In Miniatures. I had an absolute blast doing it and it’s one of my favourite hobby-centred shows on YouTube so it was a real honour for me to be able to appear. It may well be their least successful show, but it’s a highlight of my hobby career for sure.

I wanted to put this little post together as a companion piece to the video. Once you’ve given it a watch, it might be fun/useful to refer to the notes below to get some more information. There were also a number of questions from their Patreon that I didn’t get the chance to answer, so I’ve answered some of those below too. Anyway, I really hope you enjoy the show, and I hope the stuff below is interesting too.

Show notes/useful links:

1 – For those of you looking for more information on the fascinating Mechanical Turk, here’s a Wikipedia article for you to enjoy on the subject. And a little more on what it means today in the context of digital marketing. 

2 – Just as an aside, when I used to go to those meetings where we worked out how many of each product the marketing team would need, I kept notes in my notebook before updating the spreadsheet. I once left that notebook in Bugmans after a meeting. It sat there for 15 minutes, entirely unguarded, and not a single person looked into it before I got back to rescue it. But that could have landed me in a great deal of trouble if someone had! Thankfully, the people who go to Bugmans are largely excellent people and so I wasn’t responsible for the biggest leak ever. Phew.

It’s also worth noting that there is a much more complex process for working out how much stock may be needed, but it’s still a very difficult thing to try and work out.

3 – Genuinely, Dead of Winter is an amazing game and well worth your time if you can get yourself a copy. Here’s a bit more info if you’re interested. 

4 – Go look at some webcomics! They’re still on Warhammer Community and there’s still a lot of laughs to be found there. And stay tuned to Dr Geof’s website for news of Biscuit Wars! 

5 – If you’ve never read it, here’s my tretiese on Freehanding and I hope you’ll find it useful. 

6 – Here’s John Blanche talking about his art. Also, I don’t know if I am talented enough a painter to be any authority on Blanchitsu, so if you want to see some real exemplars of this art style, check out Iron Sleet – those guys do it 10,000 times better than I do it, and were a big part in organising The Pilgrym – what Peachy mentioned.

7 – If you want to see the John Blanche Femme Militant models, you can take a look at them here. 

8 – Honestly, leaks are the worst thing when you work at Warhammer Community. It’s like having to deal with the kid who has not only looked at their own Christmas gifts on December 14th, but they’ve also looked at everyone else’s, and they tell everyone. Bastards. No, GW have never fabricated a leak – they are genuinely the most annoying things in the world, and even before I worked at GW, I made a great effort to not look at those grainy images. 

9 – If you are just now discovering that I have a podcast, My Life In Miniatures, you can find all of the episodes (25 at the time of writing) on Audible, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and you can listen to them all directly from the MLIM Podcast page!

10 – Oh my! 

11 – If you’re ever going to be teaching someone how to play a game, to help ensure that they have a good time, it’s well worth watching this video from Shut Up & Sit Down. 

12 – Shout out to the guys in my old Blood Bowl league! And also, Daughter, should you ever read your dad’s old blog in many years’ time, I was in no way blaming you for me missing out on Blood Bowl. You were way more entertaining than any game could have been and changing your nappies, and being shouted at by you when you were hungry was my pleasure.

13 – Kevin Kanner’s Carcharodons (Space Sharks) for you to take a look at. 

14 – Zoats! 

15 – I lied about my favourite toe. It’s actually this one.

16 – I got the young Space Wolf’s name wrong – it was Brand. I apologise for the mistake. It was a heartbreaking instance, and the studio, the publications folk and writers did such a lovely thing. You can learn a little more about it here. 

17 – Sorry if I butchered your name, Seyni! Here are his Carcharodons and his West African inspired Ad Mech army – it was a joy to help bring these to the wider community.

Extra Questions

And now, here are some answers to some of the Patrreon Questions that we didn’t get time for on the show. I’d also highly recommend the Painting Phase Patreon and I hope you’ll be able to support them.

James asks: Was there pressure to make it more ‘marketing’ than genuine community? And did that mean there was influence from outside of Warcom on who to interact with?

John answers: Not really. The only real pressure came from being a team that GW had never had before – a marketing team. We needed to prove that we were needed, and all that ever meant was that we always tried our hardest to get great content out there, but as mentioned in the video, sometimes you had to focus on the really important stuff, and the fun stuff would have to wait a spell.

Michael asks: How hard did you have to work to get GW to start working with external people?

John answers: Personally, not hard at all. It was the start of the era where the company was starting to understand that it needed to interact more with the community. The Partner programme was a great way of getting the product out there, and the articles we generated were the best advert for the hobby.

Josh asks: Were there any influencers/channels that wanted nothing to do with GW that you regularly tried to tempt? 

John answers: Nope. I always approached people respectfully, and if they said no, they said no. That was the end of it. Maybe once or twice we would start doing something new that I thought might tempt them to join the programme, and I’d test the waters again, but that was the limit of it.

Kristinn asks: Did you work with the White Dwarf team? What were the differences between Warcom and White Dwarf?

John answers: Occasionally, but not as often as I’d like to. We’d occasionally share photo assets, or give each other leads on good hobby, but they’re two very different entities that do very different jobs these days. Honestly, I think White Dwarf is amazing these days, and they’ve really found the perfect niche for them in in supporting and developing the hobby through idea-led content. White Dwarf remains an excellent publication with a great team behind it. And I was always thrilled to contribute to it if I could with their painting/modelling challenges – I did a few of those 🙂

Richard asks: If you were an animal, what would you be?

John answers: Kommodo Dragon. Because they’re awesome.

Andrew asks: How does one get their minis featured on Warhammer Community?

John answers: Send it to the Community inbox. If you’ve got an army, I would always ask for about 800 words, in-focus images on a white background, and an assurance that no non-GW bits had been used. This may well have changed since I was there, but I’m sure they still like to see good hobby as much as possible. Here’s the email address: community@gwplc.com

In Closing

Like I said earlier, this has been a highlight of my hobby career. It was so much fun reminiscing with Peachy, and meeting Geoff and Pat was great too. And it’s been so nice to read so many positive and complimentary comments too, both from people just discovering my slice of the hobby and my Podcast for the first time, and from old friends, colleagues and those partners that I used to work with. It’s been the most delightful of ego-strokings!

I hope you are enjoying your hobby and having an excellent time with clippers, glue and brushes. Onwards!