least favourite d&d artwork!

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All these comments about the slain dragon pic highlight why I have mixed feelings about it. Technically is not a badly painted pic or composition. But once you start looking at it closely and asking questions it all leads to "Did these guys just murder a baby dragon for that tiny bit of loot?" More than to "This is a young band adventurers who just got done with a day's hard work!"

I know that the pic was supposed to invoke the later, but I just can't help but think of the former.
I'm not sure that it wasn't intended to invoke both, to be honest. As for the box of loot - it looks tiny, but if it's got mostly gold coins in it, it's going to weigh a shit-ton.
 
So hard to choose, so many bad ideas & just bad art. Others have probably hit most of the high (low?) points. Probably this one though. I have no clue what's going on. It's supposed to be an action shot but nobody looks like they could actually move, that might be supposed to be a giant but WotC hasn't written any really big monsters since 3e, and why is levitating girl casting light on her own eyeballs?

wtfdndpic.jpg
 
I thought about the 5e covers.

But then I thought about it and remembered how much I hated the 4th edition covers. And the 3rd edition covers. And the second edition covers weren't great at all,. And the first edition covers were pretty horrible, though at least the PHB's image was somewhat iconic.

Actually, I think the only core rulebooks covers in the entire history of D&D I ever liked was the Red Box, and the one DM's Guide with the wizard in the doorway. I think it was AD&D 1st edition, but like a second cover, or something.
 
Actually, I think the only core rulebooks covers in the entire history of D&D I ever liked was the Red Box, and the one DM's Guide with the wizard in the doorway. I think it was AD&D 1st edition, but like a second cover, or something.
It was - second printing, with the orange spine that tended to come off.
 
Here's another one that isn't technically bad (though the poses have that artificial stiffness of a Vallejo), but I detest with a seething h8tred:

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Reinterpreting the Dark Elves as ethnically African is so incredibly stupid (and tonedeaf even for the time period) in multiple ways.

Never really got that from this pic. A lot of the early dark elf art depicted them was brown skinned, probably cuz that felt more natural to the artist when thinking of dark skinned humanoids. Brown skin does not necessarily imply African. Some Indians, South Asians and Australian aboriginals also have brown skin. It's just a natural human dark skin color.

I always included brown skinned dark elves in my games, taking cues from this picture. And my main dark elf character had brown skin.
 
On the D&D art documentary, it mentioned how Clyde called yoinks on any hot women art. I love his art and have no problem with cheesecake but even he was silly at times.

The-Sea-Fox.jpg

I still love this pic and Caldwell's work!
 
Brown skin does not necessarily imply African.

Perhaps not necessarily, but that image clearly does. In general though, I can't imagine any reasonable explanation why residing in caves underground would cause an excess of melanin among a group. The original Morlocks were visually patterned on the Morlocks of HG Wells' The Time Machine, specifcally as they appeared in the 1960 George Pal film adaption, in contrast to the Eloi-adjacent Elves above ground.

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Devoid of that very specific reference, having the Dark Elves be darker-skinned makes no sense whatsoever. If anything, they'd be prone to albinoism.
 
Perhaps not necessarily, but that image clearly does. In general though, I can't imagine any reasonable explanation why residing in caves underground would cause an excess of melanin among a group. The original Morlocks were visually patterned on the Morlocks of HG Wells' The Time Machine, specifcally as they appeared in the 1960 George Pal film adaption, in contrast to the Eloi-adjacent Elves above ground.

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Devoid of that very specific reference, having the Dark Elves be darker-skinned makes no sense whatsoever. If anything, they'd be prone to albinoism.

Yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with that and have heard that argument a lot of times over the years. Though, that does come from a more scientific point of view, rather than "It's magic/fantasy!". But I've become so accustomed to dark elves being dark skinned I don't really think about it. I think it comes from Norse dark elves being described as "swarthy" colored.
 
So which artist would you guy say is the king of cheesecake? Clyde Caldwell or Boris Vallejo?
 
Did he do fantasy? His wheelhouse appears to be 1940s or 50s style pinups.
 
Nudes are porn? Gawwww so uncultured!
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. And those dark Elves didn't give me an African vibe, either.
What happened to the real Tristram and how do we chase off the doppelganger who has got his password for the Pub:grin:?
 
That picture isn't an artistic nude, lol, it's a pirate with huge nipples poking through her shirt and the type of underwear you have to shave several times daily to pull off
Hmm. I don't know. Pirate theme implies historic. And history is part of culture.
Huge nipples is body positive and self acceptance to rock that outfit.
Shaving is hygienic. .. hard to fault her for that.
Really, I'm trying to meet you half way but I don't know how to go about it! ;)
 
Hmm. I don't know. Pirate theme implies historic. And history is part of culture.
Huge nipples is body positive and self acceptance to rock that outfit.
Shaving is hygienic. .. hard to fault her for that.
Really, I'm trying to meet you half way but I don't know how to go about it! ;)

lol, I'm not saying it's bad artwork, or anyone shouldn't like it. It certainly wouldn't have been a piece that I would have submitted to this thread, unlike the weird melon-stuffed chainmail girl without internal organs in her torso pic I posted earlier in the thread. I love cheesecake art. Hence the George Pretty namedrop.

But I'm going to call a spade a spade.
 
lol, I'm not saying it's bad artwork, or anyone shouldn't like it. It certainly wouldn't have been a piece that I would have submitted to this thread, unlike the weird melon-stuffed chainmail girl without internal organs in her torso pic I posted earlier in the thread. I love cheesecake art. Hence the George Pretty namedrop.

But I'm going to call a spade a spade.
I'm just poking fun (obvi). We're all free to like or dislike what we want! :smile:
 
That picture isn't an artistic nude, lol, it's a pirate with huge nipples poking through her shirt and the type of underwear you have to shave several times daily to pull off
Women have been removing body hair for hygiene and appearance for a long, long time. I imagine it would be de rigueur for sophisticated adventuresses. That thong she's wearing is a bit of a stretch, though.
 
Here's another one that isn't technically bad (though the poses have that artificial stiffness of a Vallejo), but I detest with a seething h8tred:

View attachment 46818

Reinterpreting the Dark Elves as ethnically African is so incredibly stupid (and tonedeaf even for the time period) in multiple ways.
The otherwise-good Keith Parkinson’s most embarrassing offense…
 
The otherwise-good Keith Parkinson’s most embarrassing offense…


I assume he just didn't get a good enough description beforehand. That picture does look like he used models, I'd be curious if any reference pics ever showed up online
 
By accident or design TSR c. 1986 decided to interpret drow “black” skin as brown like African-Americans - it wasn’t just Parkinson, Elmore’s cover of “The Crystal Shard” from 1988 depicts Drizzt the same way. I don’t know if they thought literal black skin would be considered offensive but brown skin wouldn’t, or what. Either way, it looks in retrospect like an embarrassing misjudgment (especially on the GDQ1-7 cover in combination with the sheer spiderweb swimsuit and high-heeled fuck-me boots).
 
By accident or design TSR c. 1986 decided to interpret drow “black” skin as brown like African-Americans - it wasn’t just Parkinson, Elmore’s cover of “The Crystal Shard” from 1988 depicts Drizzt the same way. I don’t know if they thought literal black skin would be considered offensive but brown skin wouldn’t, or what. Either way, it looks in retrospect like an embarrassing misjudgment (especially on the GDQ1-7 cover in combination with the sheer spiderweb swimsuit and high-heeled fuck-me boots).

IDK, I think that this is a very narrow, US centric way of interpreting things. Even using the term "African-Americans", like those are the primary people on Earth with this skin tone, even above Africans from Africa or other parts of the world, reveals how US-centric this is. And it takes a narrow political lens to see it that way--the kind of lens that would probably still take offense to it even if they were literal black skinned as well (with people bringing up "black face" or asking what they were trying to represent with pure black *accusatory tone*).

Literal black skin is also very difficult to pull off effectively in art work. It's very difficult to paint or draw anything that stands out and doesn't disappear into the background or become a black featureless blob if you go with pure black as a skin tone. Some people might be able to do it with flat inkwork, but it takes skill and sort of limits your options with presentation to make it stand out and see the features clearly.

Most of the drow color art even after this still doesn't depict them as literal black. They almost always went with purplish, blueish or grey skin. The only exception I can think of from TSR era is a couple of inkwork, like the interior art in Drow of the Underdark.
 
IDK, I think that this is a very narrow, US centric way of interpreting things. Even using the term "African-Americans", like those are the primary people on Earth with this skin tone, even above Africans from Africa or other parts of the world, reveals how US-centric this is. And it takes a narrow political lens to see it that way--the kind of lens that would probably still take offense to it even if they were literal black skinned as well.

Literal black skin is also very difficult to pull off effectively in art work. It's very difficult to paint or draw anything that stands out and doesn't disappear into the background or become a black featureless blob if you go with pure black as a skin tone. Some people might be able to do it with flat inkwork, but it takes skill and sort of limits your options with presentation to make it stand out and see the features clearly.

Most of the drow color art even after this still doesn't depict them as literal black. They almost always went with purplish, blueish or grey skin. The only exception I can think of from TSR era is a couple of inkwork, like the interior art in Drow of the Underdark.
Well to be fair, this was a U.S. produced product, for a (primarily) U.S. audience. The fact that any of it might have spilled across other borders is sort of incidental in this context. The producers were intimately familiar with the market and probably should have gone a differnt way. That isn't to say that I think TSR/Parkinson were being malicious or had some hidden agenda to portray brown-skinned people as the heart of all evil in the world, but it hasn't aged well for sure (the past being a foreign country and all that, I tend not to judge these things with a modern sensibility unless there's something overt).
 
The brown skin-tone used for the 80s drow doesn’t look like the darker tone that’s most common in Africa or among African-Europeans (or indigenous Australians) but the lighter tone that’s more common in African-Americans - for obvious historical/cultural reasons that we don’t need to go into in this thread - which is why I specifically said African-American not African. The way these drow were drawn was specifically African-American.

Whether that was an intentional decision or an odd miscommunication caused by lack of familiarity with the prior art and lore on the subject isn’t something I can answer (and Keith Parkinson is dead so he can’t either).
 
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