Is anyone else a little disappointed in the generic look of fantasy art these days? Replace the cover of pretty much any D&D rulebook/fantasy novel/comic book of the last 15 years, swap it with a completely unrelated work from the same genre, and you would be hard-pressed to tell anything had changed. Most likely it will still feature a fairly photorealistic elf-babe in dramatic lighting clutching a sword, either riding and/or battling a dragon.
Well alright, maybe it isn't the
subject matter that's changed since the 80s
, but I honestly love the classic cartoon-y look of Erol Otus and Willingham back in those 1st and 2nd edition Monster Manuals. Aside from the realism, I feel like the color palette and medium have gotten much more restrictive as well - you don't often see the sort of color pencil and pastel illustrations that dominated my book shelves as a kid. I saw a similar change in Magic the Gathering, roughly around the time WoTC was purchased by Hasbro - compare Arabian Knights and, say, Mirrodin: it's clear that Hasbro wanted to have a unified style, which sadly killed a lot of the creative license given to the artists. It like somewhere around the 90s the industry decided that fantasy should be
serious business, and gave some universal dictate to their art departments.
Am I just being a crabby old man, or does this bother other people? Can anyone think of some works that have bucked this trend? The best example I can think of at the moment might be Pathfinder - Paizo's art is almost universally wonderful, and they seem to give their artists a good degree of freedom to pursue different styles.
