The visual theme for 5E.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Now don't get me wrong, 4E in my opinion does have some very good artists working for it. Aside from the fetish for triangles as Frank pointed out. And the inexplicable love of super-zoom-ins on peoples' faces while they make a constipated expression (see the PHB2, where this got the most ridiculous).

The problem I have with this though is that the art is too unified. Unless they recycle a picture from 3E or do one of those full-page splashes, I have a hard time telling pictures apart--both by the actual picture and also by artists. It makes even the good pieces not really stand out. And one of the reasons that I think this is is because they use the same basic style for all of the pictures.

So for 5E, in order to improve the art design, I think that they should move away from that. Art stands out more when it has other styles to contrast against, which is why the 3E Monster Manual still stands out in my mind while the 4E one doesn't. So in my opinion, here's how 5E art should generally go:

1) Frank Frazetta-esque artwork, trapped in that realm between realistic and bizarre like a good Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. You know the kind I'm talking about; you ever see a Conan the Barbarian poster? Yeah.

2) Realistic anime artwork. Think Jojo's Bizarre Adventure or Hokuto no Ken.

3) Less-realistic anime artwork. Think Full Metal Alchemist or Avatar: The Last Airbender.

4) Whatever style they used for the earlier 3E sourcebooks back when they were in color. You know what I'm talking about. The ones from Oriental Adventures and the Epic Level Handbook.

5) For full-page splashes, whoever did the artwork for introductory pages for chapters for the PHB and DMG. Those look good as shit. Not the ones for, say, Martial Power. Those look like hot garbage.

[Username17]

5) For full-page splashes, whoever did the artwork for introductory pages for chapters for the PHB and DMG. Those look good as shit. Not the ones for, say, Martial Power. Those look like hot garbage.

You're talking about

this stuff, right? It's... OK. I guess. People are in action poses, there's a lot of shit going on, and it generally cleaves well to the D&D subject matter. Hell, it even keeps to the concept design of all the races. It of course has a bunch of problems:

• It's not actually detailed enough to be a multi-page spread. At that level of zoom it looks kind of sketchy. My guess is that it was not originally commissioned as a 1.5 page picture.
• The actual concept designs on those races are liquid ass. Who thought that Tieflings should have horns and lizard tales bigger than their actual bodies? Who thought that the Dwarves should be made out of trapezoids or that the Elves should be covered in triangles?
• Some of the characters are in really weird positions, it's almost as bad as a Rob Liefield painting on that Rogue.

But anyway, the actual artist is fine. That's Ralph Horsley. And he does perfectly acceptable freelance art. He does pretty good crowd scenes, and you can see him delivering pretty good stuff to other companies, such as this piece for Games Workshop:

Or this piece for Blizzard:

And that's the good one. The opener for the "Races" chapter by Matt Cavotta looks downright extremely bad. And that's weird, because we know for a fact that Matt Cavotta can draw:

Why did the piece on pages 32 and 33 of the PHB end up sucking? Several reasons. The most obvious is that again it seems to be printed much larger than the actual painting warrants. And then of course there is the fact that it features a Tiefling front and center and the 4e Tiefling looks like something Glenn Danzig doodled on his highschool English homework. But really I think its biggest problem is its total irrelevance. It's the chapter for the playable races, and I can only identify 3 or 4 playable races in the picture. I can't even tell if I am looking at an Eladrin and an Elf or two of one of those, because the races weren't different enough to begin with and what differences there are have been completely obscured by facing.

The real take home I think is "hire some competent freelance artists" really isn't enough. WotC already does that. Hell, even the concept artists they dredged up are good at what they do. I mean, some of those guys do stuff that I think is too "cartoonish" to be the primary racial concept art for D&D, but they are genuinely talented enough to get something across if that is what they wanted to do.

The bottom line is that you have to have someone who puts their foot down and demands a "look" that looks good. As far as I can tell, the demand from the design committee was that the designs should look like a shitty ripoff of World of Warcraft at all times. That seriously seems to have been what David Noonan was pulling for from the beginning. The senior art director of 4th edition (Stacy Longstreet) was of course fired in the very first Christmas layoff schedules in 2008 - and rightly so since the direction she set 4th edition down on is one that sucks donkey balls. Of course, her replacement Jon Schindehette hasn't exactly been tearing up the place.

Someone needs to step into the Senior Art Director shoes who can do the fucking job and has a vision that they will stick to that looks good and doesn't look like a shallow WoW ripoff. Someone like Brady Dommermuth or Moby Francke or someone. Interestingly, did you know that the current 4e art director (Schindehette) has a Blog where he talks about how to be an art director? I would take very little of his advice, since his final products (the art direction for shovelware like Divine Power) is not especially good.

-Username17

[Zinegata]

As I said in the previous thread...

1) Having a proper art direction team. There's an article that described how Magic got its artwork, and frankly their process is both comprehensive and extensive.

Unlike other companies, who simply tell artists to "Draw a pretty chick in armor for us", Magic art briefs are much more comprehensive.

It starts off with an entire paragraph describing the setting. Then they provide some sample artwork of the setting. Then they describe the race of the creature to be drawn - their motivations, their culture, their quirks. Then they show samples of the said race. Only then do they start briefing the artist on what they want from a particular piece.

D&D, by contrast, seems to be stuck with "Draw a pretty chick in armor for us".

Magic art used to be full of incoherent pictures. For instance, you had this...

http://sales.starcitygames.com/carddisp ... duct=16517

Mixed with this...

http://sales.starcitygames.com/carddisp ... duct=16514

Mixed with this...

http://sales.starcitygames.com/carddisp ... duct=16691

It wasn't until until relatively recently (when they changed the basic card format) that they started doing comprehensive briefs instead of "Draw a pretty chick in armor".

[erik]

1) Frank Frazetta-esque artwork, trapped in that realm between realistic and bizarre like a good Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. You know the kind I'm talking about; you ever see a Conan the Barbarian poster? Yeah.

2) Realistic anime artwork. Think Jojo's Bizarre Adventure or Hokuto no Ken.

3) Less-realistic anime artwork. Think Full Metal Alchemist or Avatar: The Last Airbender.

4) Whatever style they used for the earlier 3E sourcebooks back when they were in color. You know what I'm talking about. The ones from Oriental Adventures and the Epic Level Handbook.

5) For full-page splashes, whoever did the artwork for introductory pages for chapters for the PHB and DMG. Those look good as shit. Not the ones for, say, Martial Power. Those look like hot garbage.

Pics as examples would probably help here. In general I think it is as Frank and Zine sez. You need to pick a look and you need to give good briefs to the artists.

I'm pretty sure I'm rabidly against anime-style artwork being adopted into 5e.

I don't really dig the huge battle scene pics for the most part. They're too busy and frankly DnD never has huge battles.


p.s. fuck WotC for hiding all their old galleries from books and making almost all the galleries into Insider Content shit. fuck them hard. in the face. I was going to go and try and compile a "look" that I liked was gonna start with some 3e stuff, but nooooooooooo. Fuckers.

[BearsAreBrown]

p.s. fuck WotC for hiding all their old galleries from books and making almost all the galleries into Insider Content shit. fuck them hard. in the face. I was going to go and try and compile a "look" that I liked was gonna start with some 3e stuff, but nooooooooooo. Fuckers.

This?

[erik]

p.s. fuck WotC for hiding all their old galleries from books and making almost all the galleries into Insider Content shit. fuck them hard. in the face. I was going to go and try and compile a "look" that I liked was gonna start with some 3e stuff, but nooooooooooo. Fuckers.

This?

Yay! I will alter my rant now to not having as easy a time searching for them. I searched player's handbook gallery and all I got was 4e crap and a list of all their galleries for 4e, 99% of which required insider content access to fully view.