Gary Morley

Lovely interview with Morley on the Painting Phase

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I love me some Morley sculpts. His work on the 4th edition Undead still defines that faction for me, in all it's goofy, buck-toothed wraith glory. His Necromunda minis are awesome and the 5th edition High Elf releases nearly made me wet myself at the time, it was so exciting. He has a lifelong fan in me.

We did a #Justiceforgary painting competition over on our Facebook page, 'Oldhammer' (not to be confused with 'The Oldhammer Community' or the million other pages with 'Oldhammer' in the name). This was my entry, Korhil, captain of the White Lions. I repainted my childhood copy especially for the comp!
 

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I'm a big fan of his also. His Undeads ( my first Warhammer army and main current, except 3rd plastics all are 4th Morley ) are nothing short of fantastic ( especially his Zombies, to me to this date there is no zombies that could hold a candle to his ). I think folks are not aware how many different minis Morley sculpted ( and to what standard ) but they bash him over few "bad" ones ( everybody got a bad day, even kings :) ). Not to mention what he managed to pull off with one piece casting.

Very nicely painted!
 
Let's be honest. Much of the appreciation that some people have for Morley's work breaks down to nostalgia, and a certain penchant for the goofiness of many minis from the '90s, or the "so bad, it's good" rule. But if we're talking about the correct representation of the human body in objective terms, and poses, then there's no way that Morley's sculpts can be considered good. Proportions are often wrong, female faces are hideous, poses are generally boring and cheesy (Krell will be forever stuck in my mind). One could argue that at the time he was inexperienced or under a lot of pressure to churn out minis, but if you take a look at some recent sculpts of his, you'll find the same problems: while the guy on the left is actually decent, the one on the right clearly has a disproportionate head and arms (if you rotate the arm holding the bow it will easily reach the knee).

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That said, from the little I know I'm sure Morley is a kind human being that doesn't deserve the mean bashing he's often subject to. I hope what I wrote will be taken as a balanced critique.
 
erm... but the whole style with classic miniatures (which are far better then what alot of model digital guys do) has things like the hands a bit bigger then real life 'human' proportion.. and the light hearted nature was also a key point in the 80s-90s era, like with kinda the whole Oldhammer thing..

Posing is always up for debate.. If you multi-piece alot, you can do a bit more dynamic posing then a single piece.. both of them look okay to me, though the right side one seams to be learning back a bit.. something easy to fix with a bit of minor bending.. I don't really see the baggy sleeves as being disproportionate arms though they seam a bit long.. that said.. with the bend in the leg and the more relaxed body pose (which is a bit odd for an action pose, I could easily see the hand touching the knee.

As for the female faces.. often a bit harder then some peoples tastes but taking something like Ariel, Mage Queen of Loren, it's a fairly typical slightly cruel sharp lines of an Elf. Elves aren't really known for having soft faces.. but yeah, your critique is fair enough and as valid ^_^ Can't say I personally have many Morley sculpts myself.. Oh.. and what was wrong with Krell's pose? bit of a standard chaos warrior style pose, with the axe head needing to be a bit bigger but still fine for the impression of weight he is counter-balancing but.. it's a standard pose more then dull..

anyway, like I said, he mostly did forces I didn't collect. That said, I have his 'Champions of Death' Blood bowl team (never played the game though.. too much like American Football (censored Rugby) for my tastes.. and apart from that fact most of them (like most blood bowl figures) are kinda waving their fists in the air, it's a nice collection of good sculpts.

Interesting to see other peoples views on this. I can kinda often be an odd-one out at times ^_^
 
CaesarAnto said:
Let's be honest. Much of the appreciation that some people have for Morley's work breaks down to nostalgia, and a certain penchant for the goofiness of many minis from the '90s, or the "so bad, it's good" rule. But if we're talking about the correct representation of the human body in objective terms, and poses, then there's no way that Morley's sculpts can be considered good. Proportions are often wrong, female faces are hideous, poses are generally boring and cheesy (Krell will be forever stuck in my mind). One could argue that at the time he was inexperienced or under a lot of pressure to churn out minis, but if you take a look at some recent sculpts of his, you'll find the same problems: while the guy on the left is actually decent, the one on the right clearly has a disproportionate head and arms (if you rotate the arm holding the bow it will easily reach the knee).

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That said, from the little I know I'm sure Morley is a kind human being that doesn't deserve the mean bashing he's often subject to. I hope what I wrote will be taken as a balanced critique.
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I feel that this style of miniatures is rooted in the 80s Warhammer when lots o it was just about wackiness and satire and it simply became out of date when they started getting into novels and short stories with real characters.
Like early Warhammer was like "look at the funny people fighting" and later it became more serious and sort asked for a switch to normal proportioned miniatures that never came.
 
One hugely overlooked fact of Gary's time at GW was that he taught a lot of the next wave of sculptors the ropes. All the crisp detailed stuff of 5th and 6th edition metals would not have been possible without his guiding eye.
 
I think Fimm makes a good point here. The iterative process of teaching and having access to talent to observe and learn from. So bring in some raw talent and then someone with experience really pushes that talent.

For instance I've noticed with my nephew that the time it's taken for him to become a good painter was so quick compare to his father and myself and I'm sure lots of that was to do with 1) his Dad obviously being into minis and 2) 1000s of tutorials on things like YouTube showing exactly how to do all this painting stuff from half a dozen different painters.

The old Citadel printed tutorials where steps 1-3 were fine then something magic happened between the photos for 3 and 4 where the mini became amazing didn't really help :)
 
I looked at that list of 25 worst minis.. there were a couple i would say are kinda bad, but most of the complains were... very very stupid.. like the Chaos monster (that reminds me of the Fruit Gremlin from Gremlins 2) was said to be bad because it was ugly.. erm.. huh? it looks like a nice chaos monster, very much chaosy and.. well, like I said, reminds me of Gremlins ^_^. I more got the view that if that is the modern mind set.. thank god I'm not part of it. There was also some... mm.. not sure how to put it.. they basically said one women mini was bad cause it was ugly cause the face looked like Whoopie Goldberg.. huh? she isn't really my type but huh? because someone has a bit of a chubby face, they are ugly and thus the mini is one of the worst ever made?.. God, I must be old to be soo much repulsed by some of the modern generation of mini fans ¬_¬
 
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