D&D artwork which captures something for you

[Mr Fidgit]

I6: Ravenloft

Strahd playing the organ, zombies rising out of the water - great art, fantastic mod

or was it the invisible stalker from the original MM?

 

[Christian Walker]

Erol Otus

Like a few other folks, my fave pieces were always done by Otus. Man, that guy's style was/is so evocative. I'd look at his work and think, "Man, that's friggin' weird. Cool, but weird."

Just the thing to get a teenage boy's mind a wonderin'.

 

[Tetsubo]

The Jeff Dee image of the Paladin standing over the slain white dragon. With that silly winged helm. That is THE image from D&D for me.

 

[barsoomcore]

I think it was the cover of the second printing of White Plume Mountain -- with the halfling thief turning aside from the manticore's bolt in the foreground. You could just about hear him yelping. I think that was Jeff Dee.

Brom's great work on Dark Sun. No other campaign setting was ever so perfectly matched to one artist.

Have I mentioned the succubus in the 1e MM? Yum.

...sorry, got distracted there a minute.

What was the question?

 

[arwink]

Someone brought up the 3e art - I have to admit, when I first saw it, I was wrapped. I liked the edgy, grungy aspects of it and it did send my mind trundling off in new directions, thinking of some very new cool NPC's and adventure concepts. I think it was a good call making such a big change with the rules leap, helping me get into the groove of the new system.

Now, not so much.

Lasting images will probably be:

the BROM pic of a boat lifting off out of the ocean in, I think, the Spelljammer MC for 2e. (One of the folder inserts).

Emrokol the Chaotic.

and the Easly covers of the coloured boxed sets, particularly the magic sword weilding fighter and the green dragon from the companion box.

 

[Tsyr]

That picture from the Spelljammer boxed set of the "pirate" guy standing over a defeated (but not dead) illithid, with a ship in the background. Really captured the feeling of Spelljammer, for me.

The cover of the Council of Wyrms hardcover... really evocative of the book as a whole (I must be one of the few people who LIKED that book...)

Just about any of the full colour art for Dragonlance... That has got to be the line blessed with the best artwork in DnD history. IMO, of course, as I'm not a huge fan of the planescape art. A few specific ones, though, would be the "Death of Sturm" one (That picture still can bring a tear to my eye), the "Lord Soth's Ride" one, and the cover of the novel "Soulforge", showing a young raistlin, still with dreams of power and respect, but not yet tainted by evil.

Not exactly DnD, but it's a WotC fantasy RPG... the picture of a woodsman striding forth boldly from a misty forrest in the WoT hardcover, with mountains just peaking the trees in the distance, intrepid look on his face... It's used as a chapter illustration, I wanna say chapter 6, but I'm not sure off hand. About midway through the book, I think. That picture so captures, to me, what it should mean to be a ranger-type character.

 

[Thyrkill]

The cover to the 1E Player's Handbook...sucked me into the game.

All of Jeff Dee's work, especially his module covers and the Elric illustrations in the Dieties and Demigods...he epitomised D&D art for me.

Bill Willingham's covers, particularly the Mind Flayer about to suck the guys brains out...don't recall the module.

And forgive me, but David Sutherland's Paladin in Hell from the 1E Player's Handbook. He wasn't the best artist but that picture was cool...ahhh, to be young and unjaded

Matt

 

[hong]

The older style of artwork may even have been technically "worse," but it was far more evocative, felt far more fantastic to me. Basic, 1st, and occasionally 2nd all had pictures that really grabbed me, that made me wonder who the people involved might be (i.e. the Emerikol the Chaotic pic in the 1st DMG), or made me wonder what was going on, or even inspired story ideas. Third edition art--again, while often of good quality--makes me instinctively look for word balloons.

That sounds suspiciously like nostalgia speaking. I will bet you an Austrian dollar (about .00002 cents Americaian) that in twenty years time, people will be waxing lyrical about 3E's artwork, all the while bemoaning how 4E has lost the plot.

 

[Frostmarrow]

* The Easly-painting of a warrior woman clasping the nose ring of a defeated ogre, whose club lies about hacked to bits.

* The old "There is no honor among thieves"-picture from PHB 1st Ed.

 

[Henry]

That sounds suspiciously like nostalgia speaking. I will bet you an Austrian dollar (about .00002 cents Americaian) that in twenty years time, people will be waxing lyrical about 3E's artwork, all the while bemoaning how 4E has lost the plot.

...and your point is? Nostalgia can be a valid part for something that captures the "feel" of something for a person.

For me, the art that captured D&D was most artwork from Larry Elmore back in the 80's. That feel of "camera snapshot" was very powerful to me. Larry Elmore can draw like a ****** ****er.

Other powerful images:

• Cover of the Forge of Fury. That was classic D&D feel.
• Some of the images of Sigil done in the Planescape:Torment Computer game. I don't know who the artist was, but the imagery in the cut scenes of that game was the only imagery that got me interested in Planescape at all. The artists who did work for Planescape didn't capture my imagination at the time.
• The image that Larry Elmore did for Dragonlance, of all the companions sitting around a campfire at night, remains one of the most evocative images of "calm amidst the storm" in any gaming product I've ever seen.
  You know when it took place - right between the flight from Xak Tsaroth and the return to Solace - and its image speaks of one of the very last times that all of the Companions were together before their destinies were split by the oncoming war. In my mind, it is a beautiful homage to the breaking of the Fellowship from Tolkien's Ring Trilogy.