Thank you Two orcs! I sincerely appreciate the vote of confidence. Sometimes I think I'm just spinning my wheels with the art.
I know there are many flaws and not a lot of detail in it, but I feel it's the illustration of happiest with to date because it evokes (to me) a mythic environment---wandering inside a giant's castle, stumbling into one room-of-horrors after another until...you round a corner...and a flash of lightning reveals the Mad Titan himself---looming above you, about to swat you like a bug....oh no!
I used to love reading the Greek myths even before D&D existed...and this image serendipitously reconnects me to that. I even gave it a whole page in my campaign-book---one of only a handful of full-page illustrations...since it only seemed to work for me when it was BIG.
It also did the job of motivating me to get back to work on a Giant's Cloud Castle in the home campaign (before the players head back that way!). It's a classic trope, to be sure, but I don't think there's any harm in that.
Ideally, I think it's good if your players should get to touch all those myriad cliches in the course of a long campaign: play pirates on the high sea, be a Greek hero in the giant's castle-in-the-sky, dog-fight in the flying apparatus of mad K'walish in underground skies, slay the dragon who sleeps in the dwarven city, lead the forces of good against the armies of a wicked witch, be overrun by crawling aliens on islands in the ethereal plane, travel astrally to Mars and rescue a princess, negotiate with the automaton caretakers of a vanished wizard, swim through an underwater temple and meet the degenerate Deep Ones, get lost in the trippy halls of the Fairy King's Folded Palace, dream-walk in the shadow-world inside a crystal ball, grapple with the Fenris Wolf, explore the passages of a crashed spaceship, discover the realm behind a mirror, travel through time, fight Moon-beasts, quest for a magic sword, have tea with the Mad Hatter at the bottom of a Rabbit Hole, and (of course) ultimately confront a Dark Lord in his black citadel for All the Marbles.
I believe all these things can be spokes off of a central wheel of an ordinary (humancentric) world. Like every wonderful little story you've ever read, our hero starts from his or her own backyard (one that is not so different from our own) and travels to wondrous places before (hopefully) coming back again to tell the tale. Trying to maintain a single, consistent exo-world-tone and sustain interest in it for years seems too hard---and would cause your players to miss out on all the exotic riches of the human imagination.
Amazingly, little old Plain-Jane D&D makes that all possible if we, as DMs, can rise to that challenge and deliver the goods for our players. When I read about all the clever and wonderful magic items you are inventing over in The Vault thread, Two Orcs, I'm confident you're "getting it done" for yours.
