Some old school White Scars space marines for your viewing pleasure.

I was playing around with my old scanner recently trying to find the best setting for scanning pages from old White Dwarfs. I like to add old photos and so on especially where I cannot find any decent quality ones already on the interwebs myself.

I found that the highest resolution is not necessarily best, as you pick up the dots from the printing process and the photo ends up covered up in artefacts. I found the best result was to use the scanners in built settings for scanning magazines and up the resolution to 400 dpi. Higher resolutions yielded worse results. Anyway, I was doing this because I was looking for photographs of the Emperor vs Horus diorama which are in this magazine (White Dwarf 183), when I found a studio shot of an old school White Scars space marines army which I had been looking for recently.

I decided to scan the White Scars, and also dig out the items I could find with Paul Sawyer’s White Scars–one of my favourite armies to ever grace the pages of White Dwarf. I have collected all the photos I could find of it and present them for your viewing pleasure, in honour of the great “Fat Bloke” who has recently received a terminal cancer diagnosis.

He was a true legend, and White Dwarf was at its absolute peak under his leadership. His armies were also works of art in themselves. He obviously was a good businessman too, going onto great things with Warlord Games.

I would like to do a White Scars army myself in the style of Paul Sawyer’s, but I don’t know if I ever will…there are just too many projects and too little time. I might paint up a space wolves test figure as a White Scar and see how it looks…a small army for 2nd ed 40K might be just the ticket.

I first saw Paul’s army in White Dwarf 230 whose headline was the release of Codex: Chaos Space Marines for 3rd ed 40K… however what stuck in my mind was Paul’s great army. It was a great battle report with the White Scars taking on Graham Davey’s Black Legion which made for a very spectacular battle.

Paul lost of course with his customary good humour…

Paul’s White Scars also appeared in one other extremely memorable battle report, being a battle that took place over several tables in the “Battle for Armageddon” campaign. Paul’s White Scars were tasked to take on Alexander Boyd’s space orks on a peripheral table, to stop ork reinforcements reaching the main battle for the tank factory.

Dylan Martin’s White Scar veterans featured at the top of the page, which won gold in the Australian Golden Demon 40K Squad category in 1998 are beautiful in my opinion, and have always been one of my favourite images of any space marines. I would love to do an army like this. Maybe one day…

There are many photos here I could not otherwise find on the internet so hopefully these will be some sort of useful resource.

You can also buy a charity figure from Warlord being a paratrooper sergeant in the likeness of Paul Sawyer.

I will also scan the article with the Emperor vs Horus diorama and post that up too in due course!