About - Peter Dennis
Peter Dennis is a well-known illustrator of History subjects. Military History has been his passion for as long as he can remember.
He has completed over 200 books and other projects for Osprey Publishing and works on box art for many of the major Wargame miniature manufacturers.
He lives in Nottinghamshire, the hub of wargames figure production in the UK.
Peter writes about Paper Soldiers:
Long before I thought of becoming an illustrator, or had any idea that Paper soldiers were a ‘thing’ I had made flat Romans to fight battles on drawn landscapes. Nobody made Romans in ‘proper’ toy soldiers, at least that I was aware of and I was going through my first bout of Romanmania, a chronic condition I have never quite recovered from. I made some Greeks too, but they are lost.
When I was about 19 I made my first visit to Paris. Being already completely engaged by the romance of the French military I headed for the Musee de L’armee. The thing that stuck in my mind from the visit was a case of quite large Paper figures made in the 1870s by the Imagerie d’Epinal, a prolific printer of sheets of swaggering soldiers.
They captured a spirit that I had never seen in 3D miniatures, and as soon as I got back to the Art College in Liverpool I tried to make some paper wargames figures.
They were impossibly delicate, took ages to do, and were nasty spindly things to look at. Paper soldiering was much harder than I thought, and my enthusiasm waned. The papery fellows lay in the back of my mind for 35 years until I chanced to fold some scrap paper in a certain way and immediately saw how a stand of figures could be made. 10 minutes later the Paperboys were invented and my first wobbly pencil soldiers stood in ranks.
Since then many sheets of warriors from many periods have been produced.
It seemed to me that here was a way of playing wargames with large and colourful armies that wouldn’t break the bank, since my intention was to make my artwork affordable and able to be copied by the maker using the many systems available to us these days. Helion and company took my project on board and a series of books grew, featuring not only figures, but buildings and trees to furnish the fields of miniature battle.
Some subjects don’t fit easily into the book format though. Makers wanted spin-off subjects extending the use of the figures in the books, or small subjects which couldn’t be stretched to fill a book. These subjects, most of which I have been hankering to tackle for ages, will be found on this site. I’m looking forward to regularly extending the subjects available here, and you will be able to see what I’m up to, pretty much from day to day, on Peter's Paperboys group on Facebook.