As you can imagine, I keep thinking about the purpose of D&D Art as I try my hand at
learning how to illustrate. If you want to skip the long junk that follows, the bottom line is:
"I don't know what is appropriate art for D&D" and I also don't know
"Why bother making it." For the more indulgent, here's are a few little bits I have pieced together:
Perfect Art Is Impossible
Human artists, even ones using digital tools, cannot photo-realistically render a scene. That's why Hollywood uses computers and especially (recently) ray-tracing. That is the only way to really get the global illumination correct. So what every human artist is forced to do is "fake it". If you are really skilled, and really PATIENT, you can
do-like-Rembrandt and come *very* close. Often that requires a physical model or photo-reference because the human brain just can't bounce light perfectly without help---and it's wicked slow to create at that level.
But people like
@The1True have always
wanted art (even before the age of computers), and they want it fast. So, an artist compromises. He or she make something that a "willing viewer" can except as representative. It gets the point across. You can look at it and know what it's "suppose to be". The Dutch Masters were cranking out photo-realistic art in schools...but a whole bunch of lazy "artists" didn't want to put in all that effort. Hell! That was WORK---precisely the thing they became artists to avoid! (kidding) So you see a decision being made with the latter art movements like Impressionism, Cubism, etc. that asks,
"Can I...without all those fiddly little details...get my point across?". Since it's just about fooling the eye, I can do it in a general sense---again,
if the viewer cooperates.
I keep mentally going back to
this post by Stefan Poag on his blog. In it he basically says:
"I draw the line---I have no desire to make art at that level of precision!". He (like Jason Sholtis, Erol Otis, or Peter Mullen) chooses a simpler, perhaps more "cartoonish" style---and as a result, many folks do not like the vibe his work brings to a D&D product.
It's also why finishing art pieces can be so tedious such that artists often prefer to "sketch" or do "studies", and segregate them from their commissioned works.
By where to draw the line(s)? That leads us to the next topic---Style.
Different Strokes for Different Folks (a.k.a. Style)
Each and every artist has to decide how much "reality" to include in their effort...and when to put the pencil or brush down and just walk away from it. What they do is attempt to "paper over" the missing stuff with a stylized version of reality. The choices they habitually make, and the limits of their knowledge and skill defines their personal style. Often you get "derivative artists" who are in fact copying other artist's style because they liked the result (this usually ends badly, unless they eventually go back to the "source" at some point in their education).
Another factor in Style also goes beyond the technical. It's that elusive element that makes a work exciting. It's why Franzetta's Conan punches you right in the nose with it's dynamism. It's why we, of the Modern Age, don't just dress up in costumes and take photos of ourselves in the backyard to include in our DIY D&D products. Art can be BETTER than reality. Hollywood knows this, and that's why they cook the lighting for scenes in very non-realistic ways...to look
great---and love to give each other awards for pointing a camera. (It's also why Peter Jackson's LotR movies were visually poor despite expensive and plausible F/X.)
OK. Add these two things together: (a)
technical: i.e. where to stop trying + (b)
aesthetic: an eye for the dramatic (or beautiful), i.e. WHAT to draw.
(a) + (b) = the artist's Style
[yes, I'm an engineer]
But that's only part of the art-stew---the last ingredient is YOU, the audience. You have to "accept" the artist's style...and this is that hardest part because we collectively agree on so little. This is why I keep shoving my proto-art in everyone's face and asking
"What do you think?". You have to know your audience's tastes.
"Is the illusion I'm trying to pull off WORKING FOR YOU?", (the insecure artists asks everyone who will give him the time-of-day). It's necessary to get that feedback because the artists has no way of knowing what's not working in his or her selectively-handicapped-version-of-light-and-choice-of-content. Producing art and getting no feedback is a sad state of affairs I can tell you---because you are STUCK, with no clue on what to fix (next)---or, crutially, if he or she can simply
STOP. As one of the art instructors at proko.com said in an interview---
a drawing is only as good as it's worst piece. But knowing what
others consider to be a bridge-too-far in your stylized portrayal of reality is something you cannot determine in isolation.
Practically speaking, the real grognards want clean lines...preferably in black & white --- such as was achieved by using real India Ink with a stylus, on paper. Since that ink is PURE black, you can't get any contrast-variation unless you do (careful and laborious)
cross-hatching to fake greys. Thus the classic "wood-cut" style, named after the fact that folks like
Tenniel (illustrator of Alice in Wonderland) used to carve all those little cross-contour lines for his prints in blocks of wood for the printing presses, and authors like Lewis Carroll had to wait months for him to
start because of a backed-up queue. This style is also great for B&W home-printing. (Make a mental note that this is also what comic books emulated with slightly better printing tech when inked traditionally.)
But this is also where style choice can kill you. One of the complaints about 3e and 4e illustrations is that the style choices were a turn off. Part (a), the technique, was sometimes better than those old TSR black and white illustrations (I'll get back to that in a sec)---but remember...they were still a
compromise, and a far cry from photo-realistic. Also Part (b), the content/presentation, was very comic-book-ish and full of artificially posed characters in a very derivative, amateur layout. A segment of the old-school audience rejected it (I don't like it by-and-large either).
There is an
Uncanny Valley for Style that, despite all it's digital gloss can "ruin the vibe" for it's audience by evoking emotions that don't belong in their D&D. Those "emotional triggers" in the viewer will get labeled as "too cartoonish", "too Anime", "too comic-book", "too woke", whatever. It's very difficult to predict and find agreement. Hence the quip,
"I know good art when I see it."
Similarly, a specific style (choice) may not fit the atmosphere of the product. Some obvious examples:
- Cartoonish plays badly against Horror.
- Super-Hero plays badly against Gritty.
- Macabre plays badly against Gonzo.
- etc.
Inconsistent style in a product (e.g. multiple artists) can also cause dissonance. For me, a few of Darlene's drawings in the 1e DMG come to mind.
(continued below)
