There's an excellent interview with Mike himself over at Realm of Chaos 80s here. As Mike says these became his full time job for over a year and they are still fantastic pieces to look at today.
First up we have Azrael of the Dark Angels in a Chapel. I believe this was first featured in the Angels of Death codex where it was the inside back cover piece. As far as I can tell most of this is a scratch build however its nice to see things like the 90s plastic Boltguns used as decorations on the right while assorted banner-tops are used as gothic architecture pieces around the setting.
The centrepiece of this is obviously the highly detailed Stained Glass effect windows which are incredibly well finished.
Azrael and the Watcher in the Dark mini's are unusually standard, with only Azrael's combi-weapon swapped for a book, however the colour schemes and the painting style are pleasingly different from the Studio Army version which existed at the time, injecting some more colour to the robes and drawing the facial features in more.
Sidenote; Azrael and Watcher are both still available from GW in metal if anyone is interested clicky.
Up next we have some more Dark Angels, this time storming the corridors of a Space Hulk in a delightfully 2 dimensional sort of way. I first recall seeing this pictured with the release of the 2nd Edition of Space Hulk around 1996 and the minis all look like the plastic multi-parts which came in the box.
Sticking with the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, we come next to the Emperor & Horus. Now at the time this was created GW had not delved deeply into the story of the Horus Heresy beyond that given in Codex Imperialis and the Marine and Chaos books which followed it. The only miniatures that had been produced to portray the mythical Primarchs had been Angron and Magnus for the Epic range so the sizing was certainly not developed to the scale of what is now available from Forge World and (if rumour is to be believed) the upcoming Daemon Primarch kits. Both Horus and the Emperor here are heavily converted from period Terminator kits, with Sanguinius largely scratchbuilt.
Sidestepping now into the world of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, we find ourselves in the days of 5th Edition. Plastic Bretonnians and Lizardmen fill boxed games across the country and find themselves the subject of Mike's skills. Sadly I didn't take as many photos of these as I thought so there's only one each.
The Lizardman sacrifice piece I remember seeing in White Dwarf 206 which was my third ever issue of the magazine. There's a lot going on in this scene, ranging from the dynamic horseman shooting at the Mage Priest to the simpler Skink archers positioning on the balcony.
The second piece is the Bretonnian Joust, published in an article in White Dwarf somewhere around 215 (from memory, please don't shout how wrong I am) which also included the Full Tilt mini game and a card Joust set up in the magazine. Another very detailed work, lavished with some incredibly intricate scriptwork throughout and some very neat conversion work to create the Noble audience in the box while some Men at Arms minis act as retainers to the competitors.
I'll end this post with the last piece on display which was Mike's multi-layered Warhammer Quest diorama. Stupidly I failed to take a decent picture of the whole piece so for those who haven't seen it published I fear the effect of this will be rather lost. Instead I have a couple of detail shots focusing on some of the heroes, which are fantastic examples of those which came in the boxed game and in the supplement hero boxes, some with some tasteful conversion work such as the Empire Noble.
Thanks for reading, if anyone has any memories of these pieces, links to better photos on your own blogs etc please do comment below.
