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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keldryn" data-source="post: 3681672" data-attributes="member: 11999">I think it's extremely fitting that Elmore be featured on the cover of the last issue of Dragon.  I first started playing D&D in 1986, with the Basic and Expert sets that bore his artwork on the covers.  Dragonlance was still new but popular and in full swing, and many of the modules that I purchased also featured Elmore's work.  As a young teen, Elmore was my favourite fantasy artist by far, followed by Caldwell, Parkinson, and Easley.  These were the artists, more than any others, that defined the look of D&D and heroic fantasy in my mind.  Not just in their full-colour oil paintings, but also the black & white pencil and ink drawings in the interiors.A year or two later, when I picked up the AD&D 1e hardcovers and some of the older modules, I was very disappointed with the production values.  My Basic, Expert, and Companion sets all had Elmore oil paintings on the covers and interior art by Elmore and Easley.  The AD&D books had these crappy low-budget sketches that were neither inspiring nor pleasing to look at.  Obviously, I never really "got" Otus' art... I thought it was crappy when I was a kid, and I still don't like it.  But I understand why many old-timers do.  Just as Elmore defined the look of D&D for me, Otus defined the look of D&D for those who started playing it 5-10 years before me.I don't have any data to back me up on this, but I would guess that more players discovered D&D in the mid-80s than discovered it in the late 70s.  There are likely more players whose vision of D&D is defined by Elmore, Easley, and Caldwell than Otus and Trampier.  These were the years when the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels first appeared and made a big splash, and Elmore was the original artist that worked with Weis & Hickman in defining the look of the main characters.Elmore is no longer my favourite artist; he has a wonderful eye for detail in his paintings, but I do find that his work feels rather static to me now (particularly his mid-90s and later work).  I'll always have a fondness for his work however, simply because of how it defined to me what D&D should look like.</blockquote>

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