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Message: <blockquote data-quote="harpy" data-source="post: 5782565" data-attributes="member: 85243">I'm someone who in another life might have been an artist. I had the  natural gift growing up, went and did advanced placement art, etc. I  just never went down that path. Still, what armature work I did has  helped me to be able to appreciate what professionals do. One thing that  really strikes me in the contrast between old school art and modern art  are two major features.First, old school artists brought a lot  more attention to telling a story in their pieces. What was being  portrayed was a real scene with action going on that often anticipated  something about to happen, or that had already happened. With modern art  so much of it is dominated by posing, or depicting what amounts to a  snapshot of a brief moment in battle. Wayne Reynolds in particular has  built his portfolio on repeating poses or combat snapshots.Second,  and this ties a bit into the first, is that a lot of modern art lacks  detail. The bulk of art today seems to be generated digitally and in  what I've studied, and even done playing around with art software and a  tablet computer, is that there is a digital skill set that can allow an  artist to deliver an effective piece of art, but at the expense of a lot  of fine detail. I think the best way to describe this is that if you  look at a lot of art today you might notice that compositions are  created that are intended for the eye to fall towards a central element,  normally this is the face, or faces of a few central characters. The  artist puts a lot more effort into that "node" of the picture. However  if you go towards the outside of the picture the detail lessens,  sometimes to a point that you could classify the outer edges of the  picture to look more like the initial draft the artist did for the  project. Now, for the half-glass full view you could argue that the less  detail around the edges actually is intentional because it helps the  eye zero in on the emotional focus of the picture. The half-glass empty  argument is that the artists is skimping on detail because with the  modern tools you can deliver a full color painting that is "good enough"  and at a cost that people will buy it.It's not that people back  in the day didn't also use these kinds of composition techniques, but  it doesn't seem to be as nearly as pervasive, and the fact that so much  of RPG artwork were black and white pen and ink pieces it lent towards  providing crisp detail throughout the painting to properly fill up the  space.The end result of the these two factors is that with older  art I'm more prone to dwell on a piece, allow the eyes to wander and  enjoy the mini-narrative and little details to be found in the work.  With a great deal of the modern digital work I'm pulled to the grimacing  face of the hero (plus boobs if it's a woman) at the center in a  dramatic pose, and that's about it. The emotional moment passes, I scan  the rest of the image to see that there is a lot of less defined detail  radiating outwards and just move on.The sad thing for me is that  there are zillions of younger gamers who aren't ever going to be aware  of this shift, how style a composition can have an effect on the viewer,  because the art today is kind of a well constructed and distilled to  deliver one specific effect, which is over so quickly that it doesn't  stick with the viewer.Since a picture speaks a thousand words, here are a couple of pieces of art that are an example of what I'm thinking about:<a href="http://paizo.com/image/content/PathfinderRPG/PZO1115-RacesOpener.jpg" target="_blank">http://paizo.com/image/content/PathfinderRPG/PZO1115-RacesOpener.jpg</a><a href="http://paizo.com/image/content/SerpentsSkull/PZO9039-Froghemoth.jpg" target="_blank">http://paizo.com/image/content/SerpentsSkull/PZO9039-Froghemoth.jpg</a>The  first image does a good job of showing how around the edges of the  frame the art has "diffused" to the point that it almost looks like the  initial blocking the artist does when mapping out the pieces.The  second image also has that diffusion of detail around the edges, but  one could argue the whole piece isn't as rendered as it could be. Still,  it's "good enough" because it is in full color and has some detailing,  though if this was 30 years ago this would have been an initial draft  that an oil paint artist would do to present to the client before doing  the final fully rendered piece.In contrast, you could look at  the cover of 1st edition <a href="http://rpggeek.com/image/499369/dungeoneers-survival-guide?size=large" target="_blank">Dungeoneer's Survival Guide</a> where all of the  main action is "in focus" and there is a lot of stuff going on in the  picture, plus a level of rendered detail that you don't see all that  often today.And just to note, I'm not trying to set up a straw  man by contrasting book cover art with interior art. The first two  images wouldn't pass as book cover art even today, at least from a  serious publisher. The contrast I'm trying to make is the difference  between color art from yesterday and today. The digital medium lets  artists create in a time frame color art that is good enough and can use  this diffusion method of detail to deliver a specific emotional effect.  Color art decades ago was all done with analog paints and had a level  of "resolution" that was expected out of a quality color print.</blockquote>

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