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[microphone droans]
[static crackles]
[machine clicking]
[Dee] Dungeons & Dragons is a game about imagination
but imagination needs something to work off of.
Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy role playing game
and the artwork is fantastical artwork.
[Diterlizzi] The art and the game, you can't separate it.
You have to look at both components working together.
There is suddenly a beholder in front of you.
"Well, what's a beholder?" "It's a really angry onion
with eyes and teeth and 'tentacle-y' stalks."
And then you show them this picture.
You cannot have Dungeons & Dragons
without the artwork that supplements it.
The lack of defined border to Dungeons & Dragons
and the art form that then kind of goes along with it,
allows for an incredible creative
outpouring and expression.
[Prescott] You're developing
and being part of a whole 'nother world.
[Quinn] Heroines and villains
and dragons and all these
wild fantastic animals.
I know my mother looked at me a couple of times like,
"You're doing what?"
D&Dwas a perfect fit for me.
I got to not only draw it, but make stories about it
and scare my friends.
Monsters and fantasy fused with gaming?
It's just-- How could you resist?
Why wouldn't anybody be in love with this stuff.
D&Dart is cool. [laughs]
It's stuff that takes you into a different world
into a different idea of, like, how to think.
[man] It empowered my imagination.
All the modules, all the adventures.
Everything was important, but the art
was the reason why I bought a book.
When TSR and Dungeons & Dragons
came about, yeah, you'd go to the mall--
Waldenbooks or something like that,
and you'd go into the gaming department
and, yeah, you'd just be like, "Wow look at this new book.
This is-- The cover is awesome."
You know, that artwork just filled part of that void
that wasn't getting filled anywhere else.
It was just incredible.
Every time I would pick something up,
I wanted to be a part of the game
through the artwork. What TSR and their artists
were able to do is epic.
You know, it's funny, you walk into a bookstore now
or you walk into-- really any store now,
and you're gonna see fantasy art.
You're gonna see a dragon or a monster or something.
They're everywhere. D&D art was kind of
the precursor to all that stuff.
It laid the foundation for that all to build on.
[Jaquays] TheDungeons and Dragon brand actually went on
to define an entire genre when art should look like.
[Schindehette] Here was this cohesive world
that was envisioned by all these amazing artists
that creates a groundwork for
where we can grow our stories from.
Where we can grow our myths from.
Where we can grow our heroes from.
[LaForce] These images are more than just a product.
They're something beyond that.
[exciting music]
♪
When my brother Dave was going to his gaming club
to play, you know, the latest tank battles game,
Dungeons & Dragons showed up and they started playing this
and he came back and told me about it
and just the idea of it thrilled me.
I can still remember riding with my mom
in the car to go pick Dave up from his gaming group
and walking into their game room and seeing for the first time
a table with people sitting around it
with sheets in front of them with numbers on them
and funny dice and a game master screen
and a guy sitting behind that running the game.
Dungeons & Dragonswas maybe six months old at the time.
In the beginning we were asking miniaturists--
because that's what this game was aimed at
and people with a sense of playing with a figure
on the table etc,
We were asking them to play in their minds.
Up until that point there was absolutely nothing like it.
We had board games, but there'd been nothing
that was all about telling these stories,
these fantasy adventure stories that we had in our heads.
It came first. It was the first to tie
rules and interactive play to dragons and sorcery.
Gary Gygax added magic and something different happened.
It opened up windows to creativity that previously,
you know, they weren't windows waiting to be opened,
they were blank walls. He knocked windows into them.
Playing role playing games is-- it's almost like
making a movie together. Everybody's contributing,
whether it's the character or what path they take.
So, I feel the art is just one more component of that.
[Metheney] The artwork forDungeons & Dragons
specifically in theMonster Manual
and these types of things offers a concise look
at what to expect from your foe or your friend
and that unites players in a way that, I think,
makes it a shared experience.
[Gallegos] InD&D you're all at a table together.
You really do have to understand what you're seeing
because you're all experiencing at the same time.
You have to be seeing the same thing actually
to even communicate about the game properly.
Having a center rail so that everybody
at least begins from the same point.
[Pages] As a DM you can go on for literally an hour
describing one, like, epic monster
that you're about to fight and yet seven people will
have seven different ideas of what's going on.
And you can try as hard as you can
to, like, put the exact idea of what you're planning
to put in front of your players,
but sometimes it does take just like holding something up
and showing, like, the magnitude of it.
If the DM says, "Well, you see a monster
and, uh, he's got, uh, ten horns around his head."
"Well, do they go this way or do they go this way?"
It might not matter, but it might impact
your decision making in which spell you choose
or which weapon or which side of the beast
you want to attack him from.
Sure, there's the-- the technical aspect of it,
but for me, personally, as somebody who's a gamer,
really good D&Dart sets a mood.
It gives you ideas as a player
that you might not have had otherwise.
[Hensley] It's important because without it,
the narrative is less interesting perhaps.
I think our imagination is always going to be,
you know, compelling,
but this makes it so much more rich.
[Gallegos] You know, none of the scenes that
any of the illustrators do
are necessarily the ones that you're experiencing,
but they are giving you the tools--
the mental tools, the imaginative tools,
that you need to populate your own experience
in your own world.
I have an idea of the character
that I want to play,
but it's the art that fine tunes it
and expounds my imagination
to make me go even deeper into that character.
The artist can come in and do that whole
one picture is worth a thousand words
and show so much more
in a three-by-four-inch picture on a page
then the designer can do in two pages of description.
It shows you where you are. It shows you what you're doing.
It shows you who you're fighting,
where you're fighting, what you're fighting.
The landscape, the time of day,
the seasons where you're at, the land.
You need visuals. You need pictures
to be able to go, "You open up the door
and this is what's inside. Your friend has something
coating their armor and it's dissolving their insides.
This is what it looks like."
My goal was always to have art in the books
that people would grab and flip up to go,
"And thisis where you are."
And people would go, "Holy crap."
Great D&Dart is narrative.
And what that means is it tells a story
all within a single frame.
It might be to try and, uh...
give some narrative about a character.
Like, for example, a warrior who might have
trophy skulls hanging from his belt or something.
So that there's something that you can look at
that character and see that there's a history there.
Then there's also ones that hopefully are more
entertainment value. That often you will find
on the cover of a module where you see
the conflict in progress.
I wanted to show things going good and bad
at the same time. It's just how it goes
when you're playingD&D.
Someone might be having a really hard time over here,
but your buddy's picking up the slack.
You might win, you might lose.
They wanted this epic scene of these adventurers
lowering themselves down into this stone pit.
I think the art direction for this didn't specify
too much other than there's goblins at the bottom
and a fighter and a sorcerer.
Like they didn't say to add these disgusting,
giant centipedes coming out of the gargoyle mouths,
but I thought that would just be fun.
Like, "Let's ratchet it up just a little bit more."
It's not enough that this is going on.
That's the core of what we as fantasy artists,
I think, is... is so important
is that we give the viewers these options.
These Choose-Your-Own-Adventure images.
The art, especially in those, like, smaller scenes,
give you the sense that there is something
bigger happening.
That this is a moment in time that you're capturing
in the lives of these characters,
but there's always little bits and pieces
that show that there is stuff that's going on
around them, before them, after them.
That there is a bigger world that you can find yourself in.
For me it's that moment before things happen.
It's that moment of time when things could go either way.
So everything is like this boulder
sitting on the top of a hill ready to be pushed off.
That's kind of what Dungeons & Dragonsis about.
It's about reading into things
and figuring out the story for yourself.
[Diterlizzi] It's not relaying a story that's already done
and telling you, "Well, this happened
and then this happened and then this happened.
Here's the scene where it happened."
It's saying, "This happens...
now what are you going to do about it?"
When there's action, there's not much emotion
'cause action is something that happens.
It's very spontaneous. There's no time for thinking.
You got to react or die or win. One or the other.
It's before an action or after an action where emotion is.
And it's like-- there's a painting called
Avalyne the Life Giver.
[Lockwood] In the foreground, it's a snowy scene
and there's a tree, and at the base of the tree
there is a fighter who's been laid out, clubbed.
And there's a cleric preparing to heal him
and then you see footprints off over the hill
and in the distant treeline there's a giant
towering above it with his club over his shoulder.
And the storytelling in that is so...
epic and intimate at the same time.
My involvement in games right now is with
the retro gaming community. So we're talking with people
who are playing games as they were played in 1978, 1979.
So they're looking to recreate that first love experience.
And if you can go back in time and find an image...
a good image, that really tells that story
about that first love and that is that Trampier piece.
[Taylor] When you go First Edition Dungeons & Dragons
Players Handbook, he showed you D&D.
I think the reason why it's effective
is because this is where I wanna go.
You know, I want to see this.
-I want to steal this jewel. -[laughter]
I think, "What happened in that room?"
Like, "What did those people kill?
What is that on the altar? Why is that on the altar?
Where did they come from? Where are they going?
What happens when they take the eyeball out?"
I think that cover has the most story
wrapped up in that little picture.
♪
I think that D&Dart opened up a door
that wasn't necessarily there before.
I mean, sure, you had Frazetta, you had N.C. Wyeth,
you had a few notable standouts, but, um...
you really didn't have that full genre yet.
Obviously, you know, imaginative imagery
has been prevalent in art as long as there's been art.
There there's never not been a time of fantasy.
It just have had a different-- a different face over the years.
The fantasy art that we know of today,
as Contemporary Fantasy Art, goes back to
the Medieval Renaissance period.
The Baroque Era of art where you have
visual representations of good versus evil.
Where there's little demons creeping out
under the bed next to the woman who's giving birth
to a demon baby or, uh, you know, a nobleman
who's slaying a dragon.
It's an illustrator producing a product for a client
to exact an emotional response from the audience.
It's all fantasy art.
When we talk about kind of Contemporary Fantasy
or Imaginative Art really we're kind of starting
late 1800's moving through the 19th century
with things like the Romantics, the Pre-Raphaelites,
some of the Victorian artists, the Edwardians,
and then really you get a real flowering
of illustration right around and shortly after
the turn of the century which is often known
as the Golden Age of Illustration.
It's the artists like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac,
N.C. Wyeth. World War I.
That's kind of the beginning of the decline
of the Golden Age of Illustration.
Particularly imaginative illustration because
after World War I the public largely lost
its appetite for light-hearted fantasy sorts of things.
So at that point, that tradition kind of stalls
and Frazetta picks it back up again.
Frazetta's first Conancovers came out and I saw those
and that was an epiphany moment. It's...
I thought, "That's it. That's what I'm trying to find."
[Phoenix] Conan, giant snake coming in
from between his legs looking at him.
Conan, on top of a mountain of skulls,
a woman in a slave dress wrapped around his leg.
Conan--[laughs] and friends,
in that big battle with all of the dead people
underneath him and he's got, I think,
a sword or axe or something
and he's raising it like this and there's lightning.
Frank's greatest strength is his ability to be dynamic.
To produce movement and energy and suppressed energy
and potential energy. It just put his paintings
on an entirely different kind of category
from what people were used to seeing.
And it had a huge impact on the public,
on the marketplace, on publishers,
and on all of the artists who came after Frank.
[LaForce] Here is a piece of mine that I did to get the job
at TSR basically and it was my attempt
at doing a Frank Frazetta piece.
I thought I could draw like Frank Frazetta at age 19.
-Eat your hearts out. -Prior to Dungeons & Dragons,
fantasy was almost a non-element.
The first fantasy I was ever really introduced to
was when I bought the Ballantine Edition
of The Hobbit and it had the Tolkien art
in an oval on the cover with this weird looking tree
and flamingos. I was very underwhelmed.
-[laughs] -I think in a lot of ways
we took what we considered that birthplace of fantasy,
literature, and brought it into D&D
and then created this art form
that took in all the archetypes.
[Elmore] That male thing of just being the hero
and charging in and maybe a woman that could kick butt
and take names right there with you
and just as tough as you were, it's like ultimate fantasy.
I think once D&Dcame out and--
and we started painting the stuff,
it sparked the imaginations of generations.
It was primed for this.
And suddenly it was this entire new audience
that we could expose not only our art,
but just the whole tradition of fantastical illustration to.
[Wilshire] As far as kind of a market place
that the TSR artists were coming into
when they're starting.
You know, they're really kind of starting with--
with kind of a broad stroke.
There really isn't, you know, an established thing
at that point that everybody is expecting them to do.
And, "Oh, yes."
You know, "Fantasy art should look like this."
At that point there really wasn't
a "fantasy art should look like this."
When TSR started they did all their own artwork.
In the very early days, they were just using people
like right out of high school or whatever.
Just kids that they knew. Tracy Lesch or Greg Bell.
I mean, these are people that are people that--
they were young, young, young, young high schoolers
or just out of high school, you know?
[Dee] I grew up in a little town in Northern Illinois
in the far, deep Chicago suburbs,
that was about a one half-hour drive
south of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin,
which is where the Dungeon Hobby Shop was located.
In those days, they were in a--
basically a converted house. On the lower floor
was the Dungeon Hobby Shop and the upper floor
was the offices of TSR.
My first professionally published work
is in Dragon Magazinenumber six 'cause we used to go up,
say once a month, to the Dungeon Hobby Shop
and see what was new and I would show them my drawings
and they were interested.
There were no rules. If we liked it we ran it.
If I thought he was good and he sent me a bunch
of Homeric Greek stuff, but I thought it was good
I might write him and say, "Hey, how are you at medieval?"
And encourage him to send me a few medieval-looking guys.
And I found a few guys that way.
[Parkinson] So it was really just for people
who love to do it and wanted to make something
others could love to do as well.
It feels like that, you know? And I think, at the same time,
that's part of the charm.
[Wham] We would, you know, get these assignments
generally from Gary and he'd say,
"I want you to do this."
And he'd make a little sketch or something on a piece of paper.
And then we would do whatever it is he wanted done
to make the monster whatever he did.
The work was raw. The work was not really defined
and a lot of times you'd look at the stuff and go,
"I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking at."
So it left a lot of room for the imagination.
[Horsley] Thought, "What is this rust monster?
What is this weird thing?"
Or, "What is that?" You know, "A gelatinous cube?"
I think a gelatinous cube is fantastic.
It's giving you information about the world.
It's giving you permission to use your imagination.
[Phoenix] I was always fascinated with
the black and white art in theMonster's Manual
and the books. They were so...
small and specific and they communicated so much.
They fed so much of my imagination in these
little, tiny drawings.
And especially now with all these amazing, wicked,
full-color murals ofDungeons & Dragons.
I prefer that really simple way of communicating fantasy.
So I think they looked at them like textbooks
versus this visual guide to an imaginary world
created by. you know, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.
[LaForce] The manuscript would just be type
and then it would stop and there would be
blank space and we'd be given that and say,
"Okay, here's a blank space. Fill the hole."
Sometimes we'd want the illustration to go between
two columns. Sometimes it would be just
in the column or we could get a half page
at the bottom or we'd split it up into small one at the bottom,
small one at the top. So we got to make that decision.
If there were descriptions about something
you had to go according to the description,
but mostly it was, "Well, we need a picture
of someone holding a staff. Make it fit."
What I liked to do is... I didn't have a light table.
So I used paper that I could see through
and after I'd drawn something that I didn't quite like
I would then put another sheet of paper over it
and redraw it and make it the way I liked it.
The good artists were just masters at that craft
of creating fantastic black and white artwork.
To create depth and volume
with black and white.
On and off, there or not.
One piece that I really remember
that amazed me was Jim Roslof's full-page drawing
of Thor fromDeities & Demigods.
He's like swinging his hammer and there's like mist
or clouds or something all around him.
And it has, you know, his style which has always been
this sort of Celtic-influenced detailed yet abstract
-kind of stuff. -Jim's artwork was--
first it was unique because he wasn't constricted
by normal proportions.
He liked to exaggerate.
So he was able to stylize it more than just to make it
realistic which is, obviously, what the fantasy was about.
And Jim was already very good at being able
to do foreshortening and make it impactful.
[LaForce] This is one of my original
Jim Rosloff's that I have.
Most of the other artists that you kind of think about
as great painters,
Jim was a great black and white artist.
I always felt that he was one of the more
underrated artists, underappreciated artists at TSR.
It's not like a super tight drawing, you know?
It's very fluid.
A lot of movement and feel through it.
That's why he's one of my favorites.
Dave Trampier-- Tramp, my buddy.
I think he did as much to fantasy art
as Frazetta did for heroic fantasy art.
I think Tramp did for the rest of us gaming art.
He said we get to have fun, we get to stick
our tongue in our cheek and still not
break the mold or the milieu.
[Horsley] The wizard galloping down the street firing off
the magic missile, you know?
And it sort of sells you something about
those sort of worlds. Those sort of fantasy worlds.
They weren't Tolkien-esque in the sense of being
really dark and grim, you know, there was a lightness in them.
[Wham] I would watch him draw things and I would just...
"Oh, my God, he's so good because, you know,
he'd, just miraculously, what would look like a little lump,
suddenly turned into this wonderful thing.
[LaForce] This is one of my favorite pieces which is
The God of the Lizard Men. I wanted to do a drawing
that was like a Dave Trampier drawing.
That's who I was thinking of at the time
and I think I did a pretty good job
on doing something that kind of looked like
something that Trampier would do.
[Wilshire] I think Dave Sutherland was probably
actually the strongest technical artist
in terms of being the best draftsman among the bunch
from a kind of a traditional perspective.
I'm thinking of things like thePaladin In Hell.
That would be a perfectly fine and effective
black and white illustration in 2018.
You can read the Paladin in Hellillustration
in lots of different ways.
Is he some sort of like completely foolhardy,
reckless guy who-- it's like some sort of
suicide mission. He's going in there.
It's a kamikaze attack. So what?
He's gonna go down, but he's gonna take
so many of these devils and demons with him.
Or is there actually something like,
"Wow, this guy must be so awesomely hard
that he on his own could go into this environment
and he's gonna somehow come out?"
♪
So when I got to TSR's art department,
um, things had changed.
They had gotten a lot more successful.
There was a place called the Hotel Claire with a bar
on the main street that I would go to
and occasionally have a beer.
The hotel was for sale and TSR was doing well enough.
They bought the whole darn hotel,
but then the place that used to be the bar
on Main Street was the new Dungeon Hobby Shop
and then upstairs, where the hotel was,
were the TSR offices.
[Otus] It was an old building with like slanted floors
and I thought it was really cool.
Literally rooms where-- that were sagging
that we didn't use 'cause we were afraid
-they were going to cave in. -There was a false ceiling
and, uh, I can't remember who it was,
I think it was maybe Erol Otus was wandering around up there
and he stepped on something he shouldn't have stepped on
and his feet came down hanging out from the ceiling.
We were on the third floor. It wasn't a very large office.
We each had a drawing table.
Um, and it was pretty spartan, but in the months to come
we added several artists and moved to the second floor
and that was a much larger space.
It was never like we were in this isolated group
or this isolated place.
Our place was always, always had people coming through.
A woman from the PR department comes by with this man
and his two boys and the PR lady starts asking me questions
about my educational background.
She said, "So you finished high school
and everything right?" I said, "Well, you know,
I got out after a year-and-half 'cause I wanted
to go to art school." She gave me a little frown and just,
"Yeah, so you--you went to art school
and you finished that right?" "Well, it was
a three year course and after a year-and-a-half
I got the job here." And she kind of like
gave me a sneer and moved on.
I found out later that what was happening is
this guy's kids were not doing their schoolwork
because they were playing too muchDungeons & Dragons.
And I was supposed to be the voice
of the importance of education.
The culture at TSR was--was incredible in that
it was very creative because, again, a lot of this--
nothing had existed before like this.
So we were creating it all at the same time.
[Wham] TSR was just a wonderful place to be
because it wasn't like a normal job
because we were all doing something that we liked.
And everybody was my friend.
The only thing that was at all kind of corporate about it
is there was a time clock.
So you had to punch in and out and nobody liked that.
It was very liberating to be in a position
of where you were basically given carte blanche
to do what you want to do if you got your work done.
So some of us would come in and work regular business hours.
There were several people that worked from home.
There were several people that would go on these binges
and put in 10, 12, uh, 14 hours in a row.
[LaForce] I used to go to work
and get there before anybody else.
I used to jump on the dumpster, get onto the fire escape,
and I would leave my window open to my office
because I didn't have keys to the place.
And I would let myself in and I'd be drawing
before anybody else got there.
I can't think of a better work environment
that I could have been in.
I had nothing to compare to it. It just seemed like...
it was the only thing I ever knew.
So it just seemed totally natural to me.
We all talked amongst ourselves, joked amongst ourselves.
We all got along even though some personnel would change up
now and again, you know, most personalities clicked.
So the artists kind of fed off each other.
We were certainly pushing each other to do better
and to do well and to come up with crazy ideas.
That was a lot of fun hearing their ideas for creatures.
I remember The Lost Shrine of Tamoachan
when describing the Gibbering Mouther
Jeff Leason would make a strange sound
which was something like, "Bleee bleee bleee."
[Quinn] So if we were doing a module, we would get
a full understanding of the story and the importance
of what illustrations were the most critical.
[Otus] And the subject matter would sometimes be,
"We need this specific thing from you."
But sometimes it would be a group of illustrations
that needed to be done and we would divide them up.
If it was like the Monster Manual,
very often we were given, "Okay, here is the next
ten monsters and it's in under the letter B."
And then you'd finish them, and by the time you got back in,
it was maybe some other people had done 'em
and you now had collected from D into F.
So, when you look at the Monster Manual
you'll actually see that there is a series
of illustrations that were done and then some other artist
would pick them up and then they would do a series
-and then the next person. -Through most of the time there
I would just do anything at all.
It was all great.
I think the one time that I really, really
had a strong preference was for
the Cthulu mythos in Deities & Demigods.
Deities & Demigods included several mythos.
Some from fiction authors including Lovecraft,
but as it turns out, TSR didn't actually have
the rights to do some of those copyrighted materials.
One of the genres that was removed from
Deities & Demigods was the Cthulu mythos
and, so, I was disappointed that more people weren't able
to see it, but in a way it created
a certain amount of buzz around it
and so hopefully some people have sought it out.
The assignments that I disliked the most
were the maps. And the maps were very technical
and they had to be very precise and there were other people
that were better at it than I was.
I said, "I don't care. I'll--I'll do maps." You know?
That's the job. I love coming here
and drawing anything, you know?
I was starting to come up with all this different symbology
for the maps. So, you know, if we needed
a one-way secret door I had to come up with
what a one-way secret door was gonna to look like.
If I was gonna, you know, do a barred window,
"Well, what's that gonna look like on a map?
And then we had to start doing different levels
and it's like, "Oh, well, now we got to deal
with stairways going up and down or,
what are you gonna do with that?"
So a large part of what you see today
is because, you know, I developed a lot of that.
The Greyhawk Map. Now that was something
to be reckoned with. It was so large.
When that artwork was done, they had to go to Madison
to find a camera big enough to take a photograph.
And I almost had to fall on it in order to work.
I mean it--[laughs] It was really unwieldy.
All of these colors were done
by pulling the color off of these sheets.
Now they come apart and they peel off.
[paper cracking]
It was a matter of laying down one thing of color
and then taking an X-ACTO knife and moving...
cutting it out and then pulling out
what's not needed and then laying down another one.
And these are the very ones I used.
I had little tricks to make it less cumbersome.
For instance--I can't believe I'm admitting this...
[sighs]
I would write the names of the mountains really big.
[laughs]
Can you see how I really put the--the lettering in here?
Just think how many mountains I didn't have to do.
Greyhawk really was, um,
something that...
changed my life.
♪
When TSR made their artistic shift
in the early '80s and brought in
The Four Horsemen so to speak,
in relatively short order the artwork went
from being illustrative ofD&D,
the things in D&D, the world of D&D,
what is D&D,you know?
To being things in and of themselves.
A lot of the folks in my generation,
this is what they grew up with.
This is, um, their, I guess,
-uh, Picasso you know? -Those guys were my heroes.
Jeff Easley, Clyde Caldwell,
Larry Elmore, Keith Parkinson.
[Taylor] That's gonna be '81 to about '88 is when you see
these guys just dominating Dungeons & Dragonsartwork.
[Easley] Well, I was, uh, living in Massachusetts
and working in a popcorn factory.
I had met Larry Elmore through a mutual friend.
[Elmore] Basically, I did a freelance piece for them
and they called me up later and wanted...
to hire me.
[Caldwell] I'd heard of Dungeons & Dragons,
but I didn't know very much about it.
So this guy said, "Well I'm going to submit
some stuff to Dragon Magazine."
Uh, "Why don't you submit some stuff too?"
[Parkinson] My dad was working in Chicago at a pinball company
doing pinball backings. And he was a huge gamer.
He's playingDungeons & Dragons First Edition
and so he'd be flipping through and thinking,
"I could do better than this. I can--I can do this.
I should be painting this."
Then he found out, they're just up in Lake Geneva.
And to me that sounded like moving to Alaska.
The first couple of times they offered me a job
I turned it down and then...
I ended up, uh...
being flown out for an interview and...
And I looked around at the place.
It was like, "Look like a bunch of kids running the place."
I only saw about three or four people older
than me and Gary Gygax was one of them.
So we just talked and they were telling me
about TSR and, you know, it sounded pretty good. [laughs]
He drove up there and started talking to the art director
and apparently missed a couple of big hints
about coming on full time and left.
Uh, and then when it clicked months later,
uh, was fortunately able to still get a position.
Finally the president of the company at that time
was Kevin Bloom and he flew down here.
Well, he finally said, "What do you make?
How much money do you make a year?"
I told him. He said, "I'll double it."
I looked at him and said,
"I guess you bought yourself an artist."
When I first got to TSR they had just bought
a large, new building over on Sheridan Springs Road
where they had already moved all the execs
and so forth out there. And we knew that they were
eventually going to move us out there as soon as they
made space available.
We had a large room all to ourselves
so it was a big bullpen-kind of area.
And we stayed in that kind of environment
for pretty much the rest of... of the history of TSR.
Clyde Caldwell, Larry Elmore,
Jeff Easley, Keith Parkinson each had a corner of the room.
I tried to kind of make a barrier
so that it would be hard for people to come
and walk into my area and see what I was doing.
It didn't work because they would just come around
and walk around anyway. [laughs]
Then the floor was covered, covered in paint.
And in fact Gail Gygax took us to visit TSR,
the building, when we were at Gary Con
a couple of years ago and we got to go in there
and in the art room there's still paint on the floor.
[Elmore] We'd be working in that big room together
it'd be pretty quiet and then--
I know I did this several times,
I'd break the silence and I'd say, "Can you believe..."
You know I was 35 years old. I said, "I am 35 years old.
I'm getting paid really good money
to paint monsters and dragons."
Everybody just sort of stops, says, "I can't believe it.
This is unreal." Here's a picture of all of us
back in TSR in the '80s when were all young men.
I think they called themselves the Art Dogs.
Uh, hard to beat that, right?
Yeah I don't want to say it was like a big party
all the time because we did have to sit down and do work,
but it was--they kind of left us alone, you know?
We had these killer dart games and the scary thing was
when you come through the door to come into our department,
you were right in the path of the dart board.
The board was on this wall, we would stand over here
throwing and you had to go through the doorway.
So if someone came through really quick they could've
easily got a dart in the side of their head.
It almost happened a few times. So if anybody's got any...
original TSR art and you see a little perfectly round hole,
that's a dart hole.
Well some people made the mistake of, uh,
when they gave us art supplies
they gave us this big box of gigantic rubber bands.
I mean, they're like pieces of inner tube almost.
So like you what do you do with a rubber band that size?
You shoot it at somebody of course.
I think it says so on the box.
One day we had our little fight
and Jeff Easley was not there
and a rubber band went skipping across
his oil painting and it left nice little mark
across it, you know?
It's like, "Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh, no-- Jeff's painting!
Oh, no! We've got to fix it. Somebody gotta fix it."
So somebody goes over there and, you know,
tweaks it around, and fixes Jeff's oil painting.
And, yeah... [stammers]
I guess he never even noticed it, you know?
♪
[Parkinson] So when Larry joins TSR,
that was probably the next big step, right?
Here's a guy who's gonna be doing big color pieces,
oils or, you know, medium that they hadn't
necessarily had before.
And, so, to really scale up to be a mass market product--
which is what was the goal and what they ended up doing
fantastically as it turned out, you needed to be able
to compete with everything else on the shelves.
And so that's what they had to do to get there.
My favorite thing about Larry Elmore are his skies.
Even if it's a stormy sky, it's just so--
like he went out and took a photograph
of the most amazing sky that you've seen
and he can just put that in any painting.
Well, Larry Elmore just does some fantastical environments.
His landscapes are just beautiful.
The land, the environment is important.
If it's snow, if it's mountains,
if it's a desert, water. This is important to the game.
And on top of that, I love painting landscapes.
And he loves figure painting, and he loves story.
When you look at his characters and they're wearing
unique forms of armor and interesting weapons
and tools that they're carrying or the barding on their horse
is really fascinating. And then in the background
is some landscape. You know, a castle, ruins,
forest, but you see the depth of the world.
I made these things. They hook over there,
they hit this piece of wood here and they float right above
your painting. So I use it to brace
my hand on when I paint. This is how wide that board was
when I got back in 1987.
I worked at TSR, okay?
So I've used this thing. And what I do,
when I'm painting, I'll be painting
and I'll clean off my brush or when I mix my paint
I'll come up here and clean a little bit of the brush off.
So all this paint here
is made of little dabs of paint slowly built up.
So that's how every painting I've done since '87
it's probably got some of that paint in here.
Larry had this thing that he would sometimes,
uh, sign under the name Jack Fred
to some of his paintings when he felt like
he didn't have time to do a good job.
It was-- Came from a little thing he had with his kids.
I would talk sorta funny and real country
and I'd call myself Jack Fred.
And it's like I wasn't very smart.
And the kids would laugh and ask me questions.
I'd answer 'em and it was just a game we'd play in the car a lot.
I did a painting. It wasn't very good at all.
I said, "I can't sign my name to this.
This is not a real painting. It's, you know,
it's more like a practice piece or something, a rough."
So I thought, "I'm not signing my name to it."
So I thought of Jack Fred.
So some of the others of us-- Occasionally when we'd
have to do something that was really kind of, [chuckles]
not of the best quality would sign it Jack Fred.
So occasionally you'll find a Jack Fred
attributed among the credits in the TSR product line.
[Schindehette] His thing is always, "I didn't know
what I was doing. I was just doing it
and hoping it turned out cool
and it was fun and people enjoyed it."
And he never thought of it as the idea of...
"I'm creating this image and this is gonna be
the birth of something huge."
This is probably the most highly-visible piece
I ever did in my life
and it's been seen all over the world.
If I had known it was gonna be what it was
when I painted it, it'd probably scared me to death
and then I'd done something a lot worse.
I sat down at my desk and did a big drawing
it took me half a day probably.
The whole party fighting a dragon
and that drawing comes back rejected.
No explanation. Just "No. We don't like it."
I went to go see Gary. "You can't do that."
Only special people can see him you know?
"Well, he wants his cover done for his D&D?
Then I'm gonna have to talk to him."
And I told him I said, "What do you want?"
I said, "I've turned in two or three things already
and you don't like it." I said "So what are you
wanting out of this cover?" He looked at me and sort of
bent over and he said, "I want something
that will reach out and grab ya like this."
So I was sitting there like, "Well, okay, I get it.
I understand." So I went back and drew
this drawing relatively fast. And showed to him and he said
"That's exactly what I want."
It's not a horrible painting, but it's not the best painting
I ever done. I think for the time
and for the game and to reflect the action
the young people wanted to see in the game, it did its job.
[Cooper] I don't really remember ever seeing Jeff paint.
Jeff was always looking at his canvas...
And he'd rock like this, and he'd study it...
and he'd study it.
You'd walk away and you'd get a cup of coffee
and come back and he'd still be studying it.
Then you'd go to work on your own piece for an hour
and you'd come back and he'd still be studying it.
You'd go, "What the he--." You'd go to the bathroom
and you'd come back and it's half done.
Jeff easily did not rely on photographic reference
like Keith and Larry did.
So when you look at a Jeff Easley piece
you feel the energy-- the gestural energy--behind it.
Out of all the artists-- staff artists that were
doing it, Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell,
Jeff's artwork made me feel like a kid again.
When I saw Jeff Easley's art for the Monster Manual II,
fighter facing off against a Hill Giant,
that rocked my world.
It kicked the stool out from under me
and kicked me in the teeth.
All of a sudden here's real art
on the covers of theD&D books.
With Jeff Easley it would be the dragons.
He's kind of one of those where you can look at it
and you know that it's a Jeff Easley dragon.
Jeff's dragons are just friggin cool, man.
I mean, look here, you've got one of Jeff Easley's
incredible paintings of Verminaard and the dragon.
The scales, the drooling, you know, mouth,
the teeth. It's just, you know,
it's just so much life and detail in it that it's amazing.
Yeah, my holy grail I would say that, you know,
I still don't believe I have it, is definitely Jeff Easley's
Big Red Dragon painting.
From what I understand the art direction that Jeff
got is like, you know, "We want a dragon
that's kind of in your face and whatnot."
So you know that's kind of how I got introduced intoD&D.
I think I have done one pen and ink drawing of a dragon
before I got to TSR. I think the first one
I ever painted was the firstMonster Manual
of the dragon and the Pegasi.
Probably a little overkill doing all the scales
like that tightly and so forth.
And then, you know, there's no horns
or any kind of sweep back on the head here like I would
certainly do nowadays. Well, luckily, with dragons
being a mythological creature that there's no--
there is no way to do it wrong.
It's, uh, you know, there's no--no dragon police
that are gonna come in and tell you did it incorrectly.
Well, as far as skeletons and painting undead
and that sort of thing, that harkens back to my, you know,
lifelong love of monsters and fantasy.
I mean, I just-- I just I loved skulls
when I was a kid much to my parents chagrin.
[Arneson] Jeff Easley's undead are so cool
because there's so much life in them.
Zombie-like, living, they've got personality.
And you don't want to mess with them.
They're pretty frickin bad ass
and, you know, they scare the crap out of you.
They just have an intrinsic power to them I think.
Jeff Easley's Magisterpainting is such an awesome
Dungeons & Dragonspiece.
I mean, you've got this wizard Magister
who's raising these undead, you know?
And you're just drawn in to the picture
and you want to know, "Why? What's going on?"
Jeff was the best-- the best at doing magic.
Hands down, man. You just look at an Easley.
When you see an Easley magician going at it,
the magic, he just knew how to do that.
And then Jim organized a lunchtime D&Dgame.
I was playing a magic user. an elven magic user
named Cragmar from the land beyond the mountain.
One day after I just turned sixth level,
we were in a situation where I thought it would be a cool
thing to do to cast my new fireball I just got.
Of course, if you read the rules
you will find out that if it is thrown
in a confined space like a dungeon,
a small dungeon room, that it has to have a certain
area to dissipate for your fellow characters
can survive it.
Keith says, "Jeff, are you sure you wanna do this?"
-"Yeah." -[Easley] He did everything
he could do to prevent me from frying everybody,
but I-- I persisted and managed to kill the entire party.
That kind of ended the game. [laughs]
♪
[Cooper] Clyde was definitely a perfectionist
and very particular
about getting everything exactly right.
I never was really comfortable
with people seeing my work before it was finished.
I didn't mind showing it to people after
it was finished, but I didn't like people
seeing it in progress since--especially if I was
having trouble with something
or something didn't look good to me.
Clyde would take how ever long it took to do
a painting no matter what. If his world's come to an end
or they threatened to shoot him he would just ignore them.
[Giancola] Clyde would paint probably like a Flemish painter
where there's a tremendous amount of precision and detail.
He knew how to bring out the concrete shape of a form
describing a sword, describing armor,
and making you really understand
the mechanics and the structure.
His colors were so bright and vibrant
Everything seemed blended so well.
[Giancola] Clyde really just put together
a very saturated presentation and I think that speaks to
the energy that was the aesthetic that was desired
in art in the '80s.
Ravenloftwas one of my first assignments when I came to TSR.
And I think it was just intended to be a one shot.
Evidently it was a popular module.
As time went on, they decided,
"Well, let's do a whole campaign."
You know, Ravenloft the game setting.
I think what Clyde Caldwell really added to the D&Dlexicon
is his sensuality for the character.
Clyde painted all women sexy.
If he painted a nun, if it was a module about a nun
she'd have been the sexiest nun you ever saw.
The female characters just always appealed to me
more than the male characters even though I didn't mind
painting male characters, either, but, actually, uh,
TSR was pretty conservative about the female characters
and they thought, you know, that their audience
was 14-year-old boys.
But for some reason they didn't think
14 year-old boys liked sexy women.
[Hensley] She's a smooth, muscular,
-but still weirdly... -[man] Feminized.
[Hensley] ...bodaciously endowed.
Yeah, she's like an other-worldly creature
because it doesn't make sense that she could even stand.
I grew up with these artists who would draw women
in these big-bosomed, like, little bikinis
and I didn't think anything was wrong with it
because there's nothing wrong with it.
Occasionally I would get a little criticism
for maybe not having someone in full armor
and that sort of thing.
It didn't cover a lot of vital areas.
Mostly nipples, I guess, 'cause, I mean--
I was painting for a game that had magic.
You didn't need armor for protection.
You could protect yourself without it.
I don't want armor. I want to have a wizard
in a bikini, with, like, wrist cuffs
and, you know, like a magical shield.
Like I don't need armor. I have brain armor.
[laughs]
Each of the artists did four paintings
in the Dragonlancecycle.
So when Clyde was doing, like, Goldmoon,
I came into the art room and I saw Clyde's drawing
and I burst into tears.
At some point I decided I wanted to paint her with bare legs.
She cried a while. She's looking at it and I said,
"Margaret is something wrong?" She says, "Yes...
this is not Goldmoon. Goldmoon is holy, she's not."
I don't know what words she used.
"She's not this." You know? [chuckles]
After that, Goldmoon always had pants on in paintings.
♪
Of the group of artists that TSR brought in
in the early '80s-- Easley, Elmore,
Caldwell, Parkinson, I've had numerous people
and numerous artists tell me that Keith Parkinson
was actually the most influential.
And I have also had numerous people argue with me
that Keith Parkinson was the most accomplished painter
of those four artists. And, in fact, I've had
some of those four artists tell me that Keith Parkinson
was the most accomplished painter.
He died way too young
um, and he was-- he was an amazing artist.
He just picked up like gangbusters man.
I mean he went at it and he had a voraciousness
to him that he just wanted to learn, learn, learn,
learn, learn and he did, man.
He just-- by leaps and bounds.
Everything he did looked better than the thing he did before.
He got to learn from some-- I mean...
Elmore, Easley, Caldwell.
Like, getting to learn from those guys?
That's pretty great.
I was showing Keith. I said, "Look, if you
have a hard time drawing an arm as a single, get a model.
You know, as long as your model and you take a picture of it
and look at it and draw it, I said, "It's yours."
So what we're looking at here are a bunch of reference photos
mostly from the 1980s that my dad and Larry Elmore
and a bunch of other, kind of, TSR alum--
you'll see Diesel in a few of them,
took to help prepare for their paintings.
For this one we've got a paper towel roll being a flute.
Over here we've got an X-Wingbeing a laser gun.
Riding a park bench like a horse.
Probably a lot of confused onlookers
while they are doing this stuff.
I think it's a great snapshot, literally,
into the history of this that you don't really see
-this side of it. -You could see that he obviously
studied classical painters because he's able to bring
this incredible, realistic world
to a convincing presentation.
He had this innate color sense.
I don't think he could explain what he was doing with color.
I kept thinking like, "I got a box of crayons.
I only had eight crayons, you know?"
Whereas Keith seemed like he had a box of 182 crayons.
[Parkinson] So my dad's take on color was that
color isn't blue. It isn't red. It isn't green.
It's a mixture of, you know, everything.
So his palette, if you looked at it,
would be, you know, glob of this glob of that, glob of that.
And then just mush of whatever this was.
It was referred to as the Parkinson Shit Brown usually
because that's exactly what it looked like,
but then when you put it up on the canvas,
"Oh it's a tree. That's the color of bark."
That is--I mean it worked.
[Diterlizzi] I think Keith Parkinson
came from a place of storytelling.
There was always a sense of story
and narrative and everything that Keith painted.
They're all action shots. They're all events transpiring.
There is an action happening and this is a freeze frame
of--of what's going on in that moment.
And a great example of that would be, uh,
Parkinson's What Do You Mean We're Lost?
That has three draconians arguing in the snow
with trees behind them and there's no road
to be found anywhere. And they're all like--
It looks like a family pulled over on the side of the road
during a car trip all just yelling at each other.
It's popular with a lot of people, myself included,
because I think it kind of shows these terrific,
fantastical, fierce creatures in a situation
that you wouldn't necessarily picture them being in.
Which is lost in the snow and cold,
uh, and just grumpy and angry about it.
He had, first and foremost,
probably a fantastic sense of humor.
He loved to play practical jokes.
I put all those paintings up on the wall
and went home that night
and when I came back in the next morning,
all my paintings were turned upside down.
I was gonna start painting and I looked over here,
well, my palette was gone...
my brushes were gone.
Everything was gone!
So I was totally exasperated and I just slumped back
on my chair, [sighs]. I looked up...
All my stuff was on the ceiling.
The phone was on there, there's my brushes.
Everything was all on the ceiling.
It's a pretty amazing feeling knowing and seeing the impact
my dad has had on the industry, but, more specifically,
individual artists. Every kid wants to hear
his dad's awesome, right?
But I've a lot of people coming up telling me,
you know, as a grown adult that my dad was awesome
and he's been gone 12 years now.
And the fact that people are still saying
that kind of stuff when nothing new has come out
in over a decade, uh, that's--that's fantastic.
And I think speaks to what he was able to do
-with time that he had. -I think what the worst thing
about it-- not only that he's missed,
but the paintings he would have done...
we'll never see because before he died
he was doing some fantastic paintings
and he was only going to get better.
By the time you get into the mid-to-late '80s
you really start to reach a point
where, to an ever increasing number of people,
when they think of fantasy art, fantasy imagery,
they start to think of TSR.
They start to think of D&D.
People that don't even play D&D,
you know, when you ask them,
"What does fantasy art look like?"
They'll point at Lord Soth's Charge
even if they have no idea who Lord Soth is
or anything about Dragonlance
or anything about the world at all.
[Caldwell] In the case ofDragonlance
I really had a sense that that was gonna be a big thing,
you know, right from the start.
The Art of the Dragonlance that's one of my very first
art books I've got. As you can see that covers off,
third page is almost coming off.
It was well-worn, looked through
hundreds of times, you know.
I just loved studying the paintings.
Here's Raistlin in his lab with all the potions
and everything. Just beautiful piece.
[Elmore] You got to know the characters.
After a while you knew 'em.
They might look exactly alike in each painting,
but you knew who they were.
So it gave you a familiarity.
When they're the one on the book covers, module covers.
[Easley] They didn't impose hard deadlines on us.
You know, they really let us paint on these
until, you know, we were satisfied with them.
So we were just really put everything we could into them.
[LaForce] Dragonlance was really the thing
that propelled specific style.
So you had Dragonlance and Birthright and Dark Sun
and Planescape and all that stuff.
That's when we were really sitting down
and making, uh, style guides or at least
a cohesive look to a world.
Normally what would happen is once the designer
and the editor decide on what they want
for their product, and, hopefully, at that point
they have a storyboard enough where they know
they need three quarter-page illustrations
and two half-page illustrations and one full-page.
They will come up with an art order
or an art suggestion.
And it is important that the art description
is clear, uh, that it's-- creates a hierarchy
for the artist to latch onto about what is important
versus what is not important and to remember
that you're basically getting one snapshot.
Oftentimes I think the editors when they would describe
a scene they wanted to see oftentimes I got the impression
they were sometimes describing a five-minute movie trailer.
"We've got this thief and they're jumping off
this roof and they're bashing this guy
as they are falling down to the thing and then
they're tumbling over." And I'm like, "Guys, guys, guys.
It's a single frame."
I always actually liked it when I got difficult,
and I still do like it when I get
quite challenging briefs because that's part of the fun
of being an illustrator really; it's about problem solving.
Sometimes it was even frustratingly simple.
Like, "I really wish you would have given me
more information rather than having to make me guess."
We had occasions where we didn't even really have art directors.
You know, we were just kind of-- and we were kinda divvying.
And they would give us a big batch of stuff
and we were divvying up the jobs among ourselves.
Each one of us got the, you know, we would roll dice
-to see who got to pick first. -Clyde Caldwell wanted
all the ones with chicks in them.
He was the--wanted to be the woman painter.
So he would fight over all those.
So I guess it depended on how... how popular the piece--
the--the product line was, what the elements
of the painting were, and if it had chicks in it.
And then the stuff that we couldn't handle in-house
we actually had to call freelancers ourselves
and coordinate them and use them on the job
and, you know, do all the dirty work
that an art director would do also.
And their Rolodex consisted
of a four-foot square section
of a top flat file for art was all stored
and the top of that cabinet was Post-it Notes
and three-by-five note cards and scraps of paper
with artists names and numbers on them.
I basically stood there while they were all working
and just would call out a name and say,
"Do we keep this guy?" And they'd say, "Yes."
And then I'd make an index card and we started
their actual Rolodex.
[Diterlizzi] So I took an existing module
and pasted my artwork into the module
and then made a print out.
This being a smaller version of the actual print out
and sent this to TSR back in September of 1992.
A lot of it I would look at and send back
to the artist with a nice, little letter saying,
you know, "Thanks, but no thanks."
And she's like, "We loved your stuff."
And I'm like, "You loved my stuff?"
I'm like, "But you sent a letter that said, you know,
you didn't like it." And she's like
"Well, you know, all you sent were like...
floating images of monsters and people.
Like, they weren't doing anything. They're just--
they were just standing there."
There's a Medusa standing here doing nothing
and a couple of knolls looking around also doing nothing."
They liked the way I drew, but the artwork
was clearly I was-- I was doing nothing.
By the end of that year I was given my first assignment
from TSR which was a huge box set
called Dragon Mountain which I remember because
Jennell Jaquays did this amazing painting
of a red dragon on top of a mountain top.
My most famous piece, Dragon Mountain,
was done as a freelance piece.
Around 1990 I had a sea change in the way I painted.
Suddenly I went from painting in one manner
to something that was more rich and colorful and vibrant
and people at TSR noticed that.
And suddenly I started getting more cover work from them.
Both in the magazines and on, eventually, the products.
[Taylor] Freelancers, they bring a vast amount
of difference within the course of a product.
And you can see a lot of really cool things
with people having cool, new ideas about different things,
but you still need a cohesive Art Direction in there
in a way that you're gonna put the product forward.
And, I think, that's something that Dungeons & Dragons
has always been able to do.
Make a product, make a product line,
-and we identify it. -In the role of an art director
on D&D, our biggest joke is
we used to sit here and say your subtitle was
"Art Director, Cat Wrangler" because...
in reality your whole job was about trying to match up
all these different opposing forces.
So you had the R&D guys who had a vision of
what the art books should be, look like
and then you've got the brand guys
and the marketing guys who all have this vision
of how it's got to fit into the world
from a marketing and business standpoint.
And then you've got all the partners that you deal with
who have to be able to communicate the art with
so that they can use it for licensed products
and stuff like that.
And then you've got the artists themselves where you're trying
to take the stuff that the guys in R&D want
and meld that together with the brand and marketing stuff
and create a piece of artwork that fulfills on
all their needs, but is also very useful for the book,
and, oh, yes by the way, makes the fans very happy.
You went from generic fantasy setting
to, uh, to suddenly having this myriad of worlds--
of different realms. You know, you had Greyhawk,
Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun.
There's a distinct definitive feeling
that's different between all of those.
And that's all drawn from that creative team.
From those creative forces behind it
and that creative team chose the correct artists
-to represent that. -I love finding...
the perfect piece to give to the perfect artist.
The first thing you have to decide is
"What kind of worlds do you want?"
Um...and define some goals
and then you start, uh...
working with artists that can execute
on that and bring that vision to life.
[Brom] WithDark Sun they wanted to try something different.
They wanted a strong look and feel to identify the world
and to do that they decided to use one artist
to establish that. Luckily, I had been spending
a lot of my extra time doing my own paintings
and these I had brought into TSR and put on the wall.
One of the paintings I did was this
muscular woman on a rock.
It was Neeva with the wings and the mask and the top.
Uh, little did I know that they were creating
a new world called Dark Sun and they were looking for
a completely unique look.
They came in, saw that painting,
and they just thought, "This is perfect."
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that
Dark Sunis Brom, you know?
Without Brom there would be no Dark Sunsetting.
[Brom] It's interesting 'cause to this day
I have people come up and say, "Dark Sun is why.
Your art is why I bought this product.
It's what got me into Dungeons & Dragons.
Brom as a person was a goofball.
I mean, he was always, always funny.
Diesel, in particular, would have a Halloween party
and all the creatives would try to outdo each other
-with their costumes. -[LaForce] Brom came dressed
as Jeff Easley.
Complete with theTV Guide in his pocket.
[Easley] He had on this, you know, goofy, bald-head wig
with the hair sticking out and glasses on.
I thought he was like a clown or something.
[Brom] And I show up at the party.
So he's as Satan and I'm as Jeff
and it's kind of a Good Jeff Bad Jeff.
[Easley] I just wish I had known beforehand
that he was going to do that I probably would've...
uh, retaliated. [chuckles]
A lot of times, because we did have,
like, a particular artist for a particular world,
they were really involved with the designer and the editor
in the beginning. Especially for something
like Planescape. When that came around, I mean,
you really remember the artist being a big part
of all that design right from the beginning.
[Murin] Planescape was just so different.
It was not typical medieval fantasy.
It was not a regular fantasy world.
It was interplanar. The art was fresh.
I--At this point...
was more confident than I'd ever been
with my illustration for TSR.
So it was a chance, I felt, to really shine
and rise to the occasion because the other thing
they told me was "LikeDark Sun,
you will be the only illustrator
on these books. And at least for the first year
as we launch the series, we want you to be
the only artist for the core box set,
for the monster book, and for the first couple
of modules" I think that came out.
This is one of the mercy killers.
This would've been from the original campaign
box setting. This is all designed
from Dana Knutson's concept art that would have been
done early on for the game.
The lead game designer, Zeb Cook, um, he was the one
who said, "Well, we want a kind of a medieval world, but..."
He said, "We've got to make it different."
And I was kind of like, "Well, you know, what do I do,
you know, to make it different?" And all he said
were the two words, "Make it spiky and bumpy."
And that was it.
This is called The Mortuary and these were portals
that actually went to different planes.
Kind of hidden back there, but they're there.
And then I just came up with this creepy look
with some of the spears and stuff sticking out.
When everybody saw this one, this pretty much sold the line.
They really wanted to go in this direction.
We needed to come up with a logo for Planescape.
And so I came up with this idea which is the gates
and the bat wings and the owner, Lorraine Williams,
actually liked this logo so much she thought it was
actually too good for, uh, to be used on Planescape
so she wanted it used on Ravenloft.
So we switched it over to Ravenloftand I don't think
it ever was used, but we had to come up with a new idea
and that's where we used one of the faction symbols
which was The Lady of Pain.
I had done some faction symbols.
These are these symbols for different clan groups
and stuff and one of them was this woman's head
with the blades coming out. She has this dead smile,
the eyes are just, you know, they stare back at you.
Very mysterious, very creepy.
When we got to Planescape, there wasn't a lot
of those classic monsters in Planescape.
There were some secondary monsters that you might have
seen in laterMonster Manuals, but none of the real, big,
core monsters were there and I felt like I had
the freedom to kind of go nuts.
[Babbey] Tony almost added a level of aesthetic clutter
is almost what I call it. You know, like little pouches,
little knickknacks and things kind of like
squirreled away on figures or on characters.
And before that, you know, you'd get like... like a dwarf
in a tunic with pants and with boots.
Tony comes along and does his gnome
with a candelabra headset, smoking a pipe
with a crazy pouch and platform shoes
and, like, all this bizarre,
crazy idiosyncrasies that make those creatures
more than creatures; they make them individuals and characters.
Everything just worked. That's--That's--
That's one of the most wonderful feelings when you work on--
on a world and it--
it turns out the way you wanted it to
only it turns out even better.
I always think back on those years working on Planescape
and I always smile because it was such a great time
in my life. And those were great people.
During my time at TSR,
it was during Lorraine Williams' reign, so to speak.
And she hired--or a lot of people working for her
weren't gamers, who weren't familiar
with industry, but they had backgrounds as actual managers.
Sometimes they made decisions that were not based on reality.
Jeff Easley was pegged to do this very prominent cover
for a new product and management wanted to make sure
it's the best it can be. So they specified,
"Jeff, only use your most expensive colors
on this painting." Which is hilarious 'cause, like,
Rose Madder is the most expensive paint tube
so I can imagine if his whole painting was Rose Madder.
Another thing that happened along the similar lines
is another important project came along and they said,
"This project's important. Make sure you use
all the colors." So that just kind of gives you
an idea of the void between the understanding
between management and creatives especially the painters, at TSR.
Originally, we got to keep our art.
Then somewhere along the way,
I'd say right around...
maybe 1980 or so, um...
they decided that, "Well, we should keep the art, TSR."
And those works went into a vault
that was found and opened
when Wizards purchased TSR.
Some of the art got back into the artists hands,
but some of it didn't.
In the generations that we're talking about,
D&Dart wasn't a digital piece on a computer.
It was a real piece of artwork
and those pieces were everywhere
and we're here today talking about them because
we love them and we know the value that these things have.
But at the time, nobody knew.
I get this call from somebody going,
"Hey, we were cleaning out the shipping department
'cause they're getting ready for some construction."
Or something "We found this painting
behind a big filing cabinet
and we were thinking about throwing it away,
but we figured since it's art, we should call you up
and let you know and let--
you could tell us what to do with it."
Then I went down there, I was like, "Oh, my God,
this is the original Trampier cover.
Oh, what is this doing...? Why is this here?
Why is this behind a thing?" And totally freaked out.
Realizing that we were, like, literally moments away
from this thing ending up in a dumpster
because nobody in shipping had an understanding
of what it was and what the importance was
-to this brand. -For whatever reason
that boggles my mind,
original artwork somehow was...
confused for trash.
They chucked it away in-- It-- At least three batches
that I know of and I did not learn about it
until the last batch that they were chucking away.
And I--I was out of my mind.
I couldn't believe that they were doing this
so I grabbed a bunch of that.
And if it wasn't for the fact that there were some people
who happened to be witnessing at the time
that this was happening, that artwork
never would have been rescued.
♪
[Burdett] A really good villain, a really complex, dynamic,
not purely evil villain is so much more interesting
than a hero no matter how well he's fleshed out.
I love fantasy art because of the monsters.
D&Dwas the first niche to fill the monster market
and give us visual evidence of what creatures were
that we might have seen or wanted to go against.
Now you can go on Google and put in a name of something
and do an image search and you can get
a million images that'll come up,
but I bet you they're fromD&D.
[Lockwood] WhatD&D did was, just by the needs
of the game, demanded an image for every monster.
It became sort of a compendium or glossary
of every creature that had ever populated any fiction
most of which may have never been painted.
There was nothing out there
for what certain monsters looked like
or certain other things, so you had to go by
the description.
We were just making the shit up. [laughs]
It's like being an explorer.
You're the first one who's gone there
and you're reporting back to everyone else
what that thing looks like.
So I had to paint a dragon, the first dragon I ever painted
when I went to work at TSR. I'm like,
"God, I've gotta paint a dragon."
I get my encyclopedia out and I look up dinosaurs
in one book. Another book I had reptiles.
And a lot of people say, "Well, why you put
front legs on a dragon?"
You know, you see a lot of dragons with the wings
and the front legs tied together.
It's like, "Well, because TSR said in D&D,
dragons were very intelligent.
They could do things, they could cast spells.
They need to use the front legs almost like hands."
I was always a little intimidated by dragons, though.
I hadn't done a lot of dragons prior to coming to TSR
and then Dragonlancecame along
and we kind of changed the look of the dragons.
I got to develop the Black Dragon
and the Green Dragon.
You know, I think Larry did the White Dragon
and the Blue Dragon and Jeff did the Red Dragon.
My version of the dragon has evolved a little
over the years and I think that eventually got to the point
where physically a lot of my dragons are kind of
almost human musculature in the arms and so forth
and you can get really kind of an expressive gesture.
The way I do the faces I think oftentimes,
it's almost caricature approach in some cases
with the eyes, maybe a little bit of a grin
or just the way the nose wrinkles up.
Yeah they're just-- of all the fantasy creatures
I think they're probably the most iconic.
Lockwood really set the bar recently for kind of
what's to be expected of dragons I feel.
You can't have more fun for money than designing
the dragons for D&D.
Todd just--he really had a hankering
to, uh, just redesign them to make them less humanoid
in their anatomy and more feline,
more bestial and really gave each one
its own really distinct differences.
[Metheny] Seeing like the Green Dragon look very different
from the Black Dragon look very different from the,
you know, Blue Dragon was really inspiring
because there was taking into account
regions and where these dragons could be found.
Sam Wood and I worked very, very closely together
on the dragons and traded pictures
back and forth and built them up
from the inside out. We drew skeletons,
we drew musculature diagrams and then we fleshed them out.
[Metheny] Pulling in a lot of different textures and colors
from real world objects like, you know,
for this copper dragon he's got a really nice patina on it,
but each, again, each dragon has such a unique head crest
and look about it that you can really start
to appreciate the culture of each species.
[Lockwood] Dragons have wings. They don't swing
from tree limbs. They don't need shoulders
that can brachiate.
A cat can't do this...
but a monkey can.
A dragon doesn't need to swing from a tree.
So we gave them limbs more appropriate to the things
it would use those limbs for.
[Babbey] For me when I'm painting a dragon,
when I'm approaching the design aspect of it
it's almost like a personality that you have
to hit, less so than a physical feature.
Like, for me, I'm not aiming for scales
on my dragon, that's not important.
I'm aiming for majesty. I'm aiming for impact.
I'm aiming for this powerful feel to them.
The Silver Dragon for Fifth Edition
was a real treat for me 'cause they're one of my
favorite dragons inD&D. I wanted it to be something
that sort of takes your breath away a little bit
when you see the beauty of this animal
rather than just a monster. You know, something with just
a couple of hit points and some loot on it to get later.
When I am designing creatures I much more prefer
kind of Earth-bound creatures.
Like, if it looks more alien, I actually--I don't like that.
Because nature looks cool and really anything that you can
come up with, nature's already done it.
One of the things that-- that is always in the forefront
of my mind, you know, outside of the standard art
stuff of, you know, "Where's the light source
coming from?" And all that
is "How do these creatures work?
Like, how do they interact with their environments?
How do they interact with each other
and how can I make that look believable?"
I am every monster in all of my work.
I use this medium in this forum
to do a series of self-portraits.
Root the Goblin was one of the assignments
that I had to do for Halls of Undermountain
and it was one of my favorite self portraits
that I've done for Dungeons & Dragons
and I really wanted to get a really nice piece of reference
that I was going to use to help the piece along.
I just wanted to create a really happy, excited
little goblin that wanted to help the players out
and he's gonna carry all their stuff.
As long as you have 90% of a truth with a monster
that ten percent can be as crazy as weird
and as much of a lie as you want and you will create
something that is believable.
So, you know, there's the-- the age old answer
of like, "Well, how does that work?"
And it's like, "Eh, a wizard did it."
You know, it's like, "It's magic."
You can... you can delve into the realm of magic.
That's what gets me excited about making art
for Dungeons & Dragons is that I get to create
something that has never existed before.
It's an ogre slingshot
that's sling-shotting goblins.
[laughs]
There has to be some type of guide who says,
"All right, sling it." You know?
So we have one goblin in there who's kind of like
the leader who's saying, "Sling away!"
You know? So then he can yank his chains
down and sling this goblin covered in
spiky armor into an enemy.
I hope it inspires the gamer to come up with a scenario
that he can put his people up against, to fight this thing.
The best D&Dmonsters, I think, are these...
the ones that have maintained their uniqueness
over the years and that's probably like
The Beholder and they're wholly bizarre creatures.
The Beholder was just sort of an accident.
I seem to have gotten all sorts of credit
for The Beholder. And even though I didn't
think of it. I mean, Gary probably thought
the damn thing up, he just described it to me.
You know, ten eye stalks and a big eye
and it floats in the air.
If you look at the way a Beholder looked
in the very first illustration like on the cover of Greyhawk
that is one look for that creature,
but if you look at the way they're being depicted now,
they've got much bigger mouths full of much sharper teeth.
And every place where the artist feels
that they can make that Beholder a little bit cooler
they're doing it.
[Lockwood] Beholders were terrifying.
That was the monster that if it didn't turn you to stone,
it could disintegrate you or turn your magic off
or just kill you outright with a glance.
So when I got a chance to redesign The Beholder
forThird Edition, I tried to make him more real
and more visceral and scary.
And, well, I suppose maybe I pictured
a Trampier-like Beholder or maybe I pictured
one of the things that had been done
shortly before that which was just kinda a beach ball
with penises coming out of it.
And so instead of penises, they were like slug eyes
that would stretch out like a slug's eye and retract.
There's nothing phallic about the eye stalks
on The Beholder I don't think.
Those are just eyes stalks. It's kind of like little animals
with eye stalks that get up and look at you.
He's just got a lot more of them than most creatures have.
Uh, if anything was phallic in anything I did,
it would have been Snits because they're just
a penis and balls... with feet.
A writer of an adventure can come up with
a great idea for a monster, but if you make it look dumb
it's not gonna have the reputation that it deserves
from the writing. So it's, uh--
There's an awesome responsibility
-that comes with it. -[Metheney] There's tons of fear
messing with those monsters.
Especially, like, classic ones because
you don't want to disappoint the fans.
[Dee] I don't think the audience forD&D has had any problem
with the fact that some of the depictions
have changed over time. It's like everything else
in a role-playing game. Even the rules there,
uh, they're guidelines only at a certain level.
I mean, the Game Master is there so that any time
the rules fail to do the job, the Game Master can step in
and make things work the way it needs to.
Same thing goes with the art.
Here are all the monsters for D&Dthat we wanna feature
in Fifth Edition. These are all the ones
that are gonna be relevant. And we went through each one
and said "Okay, Owlbear." And then we grab every piece
of art we've ever shown of an owl bear
of the different major styles, threw 'em up on a board,
and then went through this analytical list and said,
"Okay, this is what works. This is what doesn't."
[Prescott] Through all this work that I've done for the past
20 some odd years has been...
there's a certain level of challenge.
Like, "How am I gonna make this ridiculous-sounding
monster that's a cross between a bear and an owl?
How am I gonna make that look cool?"
After drawing thousands of creatures,
it always comes back to "They have to have a lot
of teeth and drool and there should be some
spikes somewhere." Like the easiest way to make
a creature meaner is to add more horns or spikes.
The Carrion Crawler was a bit of a challenge because
it's a huge insectoid-like creature
that resides in dark places and eats dead things
that have kind of ended up there.
Of course it kind of made sense at first
to maybe have it have large eyes.
In my own understanding of the creature,
I thought it would be interesting for it to kind of
feelaround which the tentacles that were traditionally drawn
on the Carrion Crawler could totally do.
So that was nice that those were there.
So in my final rendition of the creature
I've made those tentacles a lot more whip-like in a way,
so they're a lot more agile and kind of able to sort of
feel around its environment.
Cool thing about the Goblinoids
what was an interesting challenge was to make them all
feel like they're kind of from the same DNA pool.
They're all structurally humanoid from the neck down,
but where their character is gonna lie, is in their faces.
I mean, they all have pointed ears,
but they're all varying shape.
For the most part their noses kind of lock them in
as being--that's the-- the key the carryover
that came from that gene pool.
The character of the Bugbear is furry,
animalistic, ferocious. The Hobgoblin, again,
the same nose, kind of the same jaw line,
but Hobgoblin had to be more intelligent
and the Goblinoids-- Hey, look at him.
He just looks like he's gonna steal all your stuff
when you're sleeping. Probably cut your throat, too.
♪
[Diterlizzi] These characters, these creatures,
these monsters, these places are like
a fairy tale or, like, folklore or mythology.
They can be reinterpreted over and over again
for each generation.
And that is incredibly exciting to see.
[Gallegos] The evolution of the art itself is interesting
and almost from edition to edition you can kind of
find a little bit of a different template,
a different flavor of kind of how the art looks.
And I know withFifth Edition, that seemed to go back
to a little bit of that earlier--the earlier quality.
[Schindehette] The direction I'd given to the art directors
is I want everything to look like
it's been done traditionally.
I want it to have love
and reverence for the pages again.
As Dungeons & Dragons has moved and evolved,
I feel like there has been a conscious effort
for the game players and the game designers
to become more aware of the people playing
their games and very conscious in including them
and depicting people that look like them.
Fantasy in general suffers from being
very European and there are so many more
amazing cultures and stories and worlds out there
that I think are starting to kind of penetrate
into fantasy realms.
One of the things that the Fifth Edition Players Handbook
has received a lot of positive acclaim around
is this idea that it's--it's kind of gotten away
from some of the design tropes.
A really good example of this, I think, is this.
The entry for the human race.
We have a woman of color in really effective armor.
[Metheney] People of all genders, races,
everything have always been playingDungeons & Dragons.
It's who we start to feature more.
When we got the descriptions, they were very adamant.
They were like, "Try not to make it like a white blonde guy."
Like, "Please, we love 'em,
but there's, like, 500 million of them."
The diversity that the characters need to have
needs to reflect the gaming world now.
The mix of people that are playing these games,
you know, it's not the, you know,
13-year-old white boys held up in their basements.
It's a very diverse crowd.
You know, males and females, all nationalities.
So, you know, this was a great opportunity
to mix that up a little bit.
[Pages] Really thinking about the people
that are reading these books
and, like, understanding this media
and having them see themselves portrayed in that,
gives a lot of hope that fantasy can be
a genre for everyone.
♪
Dungeons & Dragonsart is important
because it has had a tremendous impact
on both the imaginative art consuming public
as well as the artists who are producing it.
WithoutD&D, just eliminating that game,
eliminating all of that work,
the landscape would look very, very different.
There would not be the expectation
for this kind of art and of this kind of art
that you see today in things like video games orMagic.
[Taylor] I don't think it's been everything,
but if you look at who's creating these mediums
I bet you...
that a high percentage of them areD&D players.
The artwork has solidified a place in common culture
that somehow speaks to the nature of adventure.
We've closed all our frontiers, but not in Dungeons & Dragons.
At the time I don't think any of us
really grasped
what a big deal this all was.
I was way too busy
feeling how lucky I was
to have the opportunity to do the kinds of art
that I wanted to do.
That was what I was thinking about,
not, "Hey, 40 years from now
there'll be people looking back on this and thinking
-of it as historical. -God, it is 40--No, it's 30.
No! It's 40 years!
I had to do the math. That's crazy!
It's exciting to be part of this
big universe that everyone knows
and everyone's been enjoying for 40 years.
It's not kind of exciting, it's really exciting.
[Seaman] It's a dream come true.
It's something that I never thought I would be here.
[Lockwood] It was a springboard for my career
when what I really was looking for was a lifeline.
It turned out to be so much more.
I certainly do realize how lucky I am to have been
in the right place at the right time
and, you know, forge a little bit of
the history of the TSR roleplaying universe.
[Metheney] I think it's a legacy and it's humbling.
Seeing the work that was done way back with TSR
and then work that's being done now and in the future,
it's only gonna get better and better and better.
[Babbey] Being able to contribute
to so many people's experience.
You know, you're contributing not just
to a book that's going to sit on the bookshelf.
For me, I'm contributing to somebody's
imaginative experience.
Dungeons & Dragons is about imagination.
It's about storytelling.
It's about creating something together.
And these depictions, these drawings of characters
that someone draws on their player character sheet
or that aMonster Manual shows us what we're going to fight
or a module shows us the room we're about to enter.
These are all parts of that narrative.
They're all pieces that fuel our collective imagination.
And I'm very, very honored and thankful
that I got to be a part of that.
I'm happy that my art
got to pull people into a game or a book
that made them happy. I don't feel famous. [chuckles]
I don't feel anything. I just feel lucky.
I'm still learning and I'm still trying to get...
one painting right, you know? [chuckles]
♪