trancejeremy
Adventurer
Well, I think to a certain extent, the art in D&D has mirrored the fantasy art that was popular at the time.
In the 70s it was basically on covers of fantasy novels (usually done by Darrell K Sweet or Frank Franzetta), Heavy Metal albums, and the sides of vans.
The 80s saw a lot of live action fantasy movies, like Excalibur, Conan, Krull, Willow, and a host of very low budget movies - Hawk the Slayer, Sword & the Sorcerer, Deathstalker, etc, etc...
So you saw the art more to a more realistic style - Elmore, Caldwell, Parkinson, etc. Maybe not overly realistic, the poses and such were often awkward (like on covers of romance novels), but the characters generally looked like real people, perhaps on a hollywood movie poster.
In the 90s and later, you start to see the rise of popularity of Anime, both in books and TV, but in also video games. So you see more stylized, less practical sorts of character designs.
I'm not really sure what reflects modern fantasy - probably the most popular is either the LOTR movies or Harry Potter? Games like Skyrim? I dunno. Probably Twilight and things like that, actually.
In the 70s it was basically on covers of fantasy novels (usually done by Darrell K Sweet or Frank Franzetta), Heavy Metal albums, and the sides of vans.
The 80s saw a lot of live action fantasy movies, like Excalibur, Conan, Krull, Willow, and a host of very low budget movies - Hawk the Slayer, Sword & the Sorcerer, Deathstalker, etc, etc...
So you saw the art more to a more realistic style - Elmore, Caldwell, Parkinson, etc. Maybe not overly realistic, the poses and such were often awkward (like on covers of romance novels), but the characters generally looked like real people, perhaps on a hollywood movie poster.
In the 90s and later, you start to see the rise of popularity of Anime, both in books and TV, but in also video games. So you see more stylized, less practical sorts of character designs.
I'm not really sure what reflects modern fantasy - probably the most popular is either the LOTR movies or Harry Potter? Games like Skyrim? I dunno. Probably Twilight and things like that, actually.