PHB II: Am I The Only One Blown Away By The Art?

[samursus]

Seriously, I love how they have a separate piece for EVERY different Paragon Path and Epic path. Even though I may not be the biggest fan of each individual artist, I have never seen an RPG book with this amount of quality art.

 

[Oompa]

Indeed, i gotta give my thumps up to the art in all the books..

 

[StormHarbinger]

Count me in for loving most of the art in PHB2, but for some reason I don't like O'Connor's illustrations for the classes themselves. They seem squashed, to me.

 

[Remathilis]

I was particularly impressed by the elven and dwarven paragon path art. It seemed so... familiar...

 

[Wormwood]

The art is excellent, but I particularly like the gnome illustrations (with the exception of the race writeup portrait, which is a little boring). The other gnomes, however, have personality and quirk enough to make me actually *consider* playing one for the first time . . . ever.

 

[Nymrohd]

I liked the art I already had seen since it has been reprinted a couple of times already . . . Seriously guys get some new art for your books, the reprints annoy me.

 

[ObsidianCrane]

I liked the art I already had seen since it has been reprinted a couple of times already . . . Seriously guys get some new art for your books, the reprints annoy me.

Indeed... though at least the reprints were good pictures.

Now if only they could loose O'Conner with his tendancy to leave parts of pictures incomplete (like faces for example).

Overall I really like the art though.

 

[Drkfathr1]

Overall I think PH2 has better art than the other books so far.

I have to agree with some of the criticisms of O'Conner though. I'm not sure I dig his style, and since he's the lead illustrator for 4E, it tends to sour me on some of the overall designs. His proportions always seem a little off.

I do really like Steve Argyle's work though. I also like Eva Widermann's.

 

[Nymrohd]

They are great pictures. And often they don't at all match what they are supposed to look like. I mean, the Champion of Corellon pic from Races of the Wild on the Twilight Guardian who is a defender of the wild? Sorry but it does not fit. And it is hardly the only offender. Art is very important in D&D especially when designing new concepts and thus it requires art direction and an artist that actually reads the description and tries to depict it accurately. I mean we don't yet have an offender like the GHotR from 3.5 (where all of the art was reprinted and slapped on topics even if it did not fit the topic at all!) but at this pace it surely is coming.

 

[I'm A Banana]

PHB2 art is pretty improved -- nothing strikes me as obviously cartoony right off the bat, which was an issue. But there's still the pain of re-used art (Boooo!) and some of the doofiest looking characters in the world (that barbarian?!) and some weird art direction choices (Why is one of the pre-eminent "half" breeds in D&D entirely Caucasian? Why aren't they a little green?).

Still, there are some very nice pieces that tend to make up for these elements. I'm not universally in love with it, but I'd say >50% of the art is good, which is enough to at least make me not whine about it for the most part.