Citadel TSR Elf MU Low Level (1985)

In 1985 Citadel launched a range of AD&D figures, co-branded with TSR. It was an interesting concept as heroes were sold in sets of three, representing low level, middle level and high level characters. This post's miniature is the low level tier for the ADD16 Elf MU (Magic User).

Figures painted by Kev Pump @ http://solegends.com/rsadd/add16/index.htm

The sculpt is obviously Citadel, and namely Jes Goodwin's. What's interesting is that the scale is different from regular Citadel minis. Or perhaps there was a conscious decision to scale down Elves according to D&D lore vs. Warhammer lore, which was influenced by Tolkien. Whatever it is, you can compare this piece with Marauder figures of the same era (sorry for the messy picture).

I painted the sculpt to represent a short Sea Elf Magician, so I kept my usual Sea Elf cold colours, and added some pink for variety. The base also ties him in with the rest of his companions.

Fantasy Visuals: Jeff Easley

Jeff Easley belongs to the TSR group of artists who worked on D&D products in the 80s and 90s. His work is as famous as Larry Elmore’s, and has come to be associated to the “classic D&D” style.

Easley was born in 1954 in Nicholasville, Kentucky. Since childhood he was fond of drawing, especially monsters, a passion that he carried on all his life. His favourite artists was Frank Frazetta, who had a great influence on his style. In 1977 he graduated with a Bachelor in Fine Arts at Murray University in Kentucky. It was probably in these university years that young Jeff met with Larry Elmore, 6 years older and also graduated in art in Kentucky (in a different university, though): the two were just acquaintances at first.

Moving to Massachussets with his wife, also an artist, Easley started working in the comics (Marvel, Warren) and advertisement industry, the first being his passion and the second the way to pay the bills. Everything changed when Elmore was hired by TSR and moved to Lake Geneva. Easley immediately asked his friend if the company was looking for other fantasy artists, and it was: in March 1982, four months after Elmore was hired, Easley also started working in the company.

Easley’s work went directly into the Red Box manual of D&D, and here are some excerpts from that milestone. I’m sure most of you have seen them:

 

 

 

 

 

Jeff continued to work on all D&D and AD&D products in the years to come, focusing mostly on Monster Manuals, his delight. His favourite and most successful pieces were all about dragons and undead.
 

 

 

 

 

 

His work is also notable on the Dragonlance series, where he painted many covers and calendar pieces.

Not to mention the saga of Drizzt the Dark Elf.

 

After TSR was acquired by Wizards of the Coast (1997) he continued painting cards for Magic: The Gathering.

He left WotC in 2003, after 21 years working for the company, and started freelancing.

Easley’s favourite technique is oil, much like Elmore. While obviously following the standard elements of D&D art, his style owes much to Frazetta, with great attention to movement and muscles, and limited palettes that work on the contrast between light and dark. Backgrounds are minimal and light is used to focus on the main scene occurring, very often a scene of action.

Easley was a master of dynamic scenes and his work has fittingly become iconic of a period of Fantasy art. He was one of the great American Fantasy artists of the 80s and 90s. Below are some of my favourite pieces by him.

 

 

 

Fantasy Visuals: Larry Elmore

In the history of Fantasy Art, Larry Elmore is a giant. His work has been seminal to what Dungeons & Dragons and American Fantasy would be and are still today. He came after Frazetta and Vallejo, but somehow his influence was greater and more long-lasting, and the reason is that he was the most important illustrator at TSR, Inc., the publisher of D&D.

But let’s go by order: Elmore was born August 5th, 1948 in Louiseville, Kentucky, a city in the US Midwest. Always interested in art since childhood, he eventually graduated in Art at Western Kentucky University. More or less at the same time he married and was drafted in the army, and sent to Germany where he stayed most of his two years of service.

In 1973 Elmore was released from the military and found his first job at Fort Knox (not far from home) as an illustrator in the Training Aids Department. This job lasted three years, after which Elmore decided to become a freelancer and draw what he liked. By the end of the 1970s, he was publishing in National Lampoon and Heavy Metal Magazines.

The turning point of his career was D&D: he was introduced to the game by an ex colleague and he got in touch with the guys at TSR. Just at that time, the manager Kevin Blume decided to fire most of the artists after personal disagreements, and so the new Art Director Jim Roslof was hiring: in November 1981 Elmore moved to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and his first job was to take care of the graphics of the second edition of D&D. If you are old enough to have seen the Red Box, get ready to jump of the Feel Train for a nostalgia trip.

There is no doubt that Elmore’s contribution to the books of D&D was part of its success. A whole generation of roleplayers was imprinted with his visuals. There were warriors in exotic armour, evil magicians in flowing robes, beautiful and slender elves, stocky and big-nosed dwarfs, evil-looking monsters with pointed fangs and colossal dragons.

 

Especially dragons - red dragons, blue dragons, green dragons and so on. The best part about Elmore's dragons is that they all look different, and certainly this was no easy feat for the painter. To tell it all, it was probably Elmore who created the fantasy dragon as we know it: no longer the traditional snakelike beast with tiny legs from Middle Ages, nor the more lion-like cousin of Baroque art, often graced with tiny feathered wings. The new dragon had a powerful, muscular, massive body covered in scales and talons; great wings; fishlike spikes; reptilian, glowing eyes; and a mouth full of sharp fangs. Thank you, Larry Elmore.

 

As TSR grew, more artists were hired, whose names probably you have heard before and will be the subject of future posts: Jeff Easley, Clyde Caldwell, Keith Parkinson, Tim Truman. Together they developed the iconic D&D style of the 80s, but somehow Elmore was always on top of them: nobody really incarnated 80s D&D like he did.

Larry Elmore liked to work mainly with oil colours. He didn’t stray from American tradition too much: he painted with real models and this can be clearly seen from any of his works. The level of detail is impressive and there is a strong realism that is only tempered by strange traits of demi-humans and the exotic clothing and armour. Where Elmore differed from his predecessors, was that he also put great attention to the setting: whereas Frazetta and Vallejo were happy with sketchy backgrounds, Elmore was painting traditional oil landscapes complete with old oaks, snowy mountains, forest canopies bathed in the light of warm sunsets, rivers meandering through vast plains, mirroring the light of the sun, and so on. Watching a painting by Elmore made people feel like they were actually there: it was Fantasy, but it was feeling real, and this is ultimately what D&D players were after. Larry Elmore was the right man and the right time.

 

Elmore worked at TSR between 1981 and 1987: these years were the zenith of his career and all of his most iconic works come from this period. While many have fond memories of SnarfQuest from Dragon Magazine, I think everybody who lived in the 80s and 90s and knows Fantasy remembers his contributions to the Dragonlance saga.

   

 

  

  

Elmore left TSR in 1987. Since then he worked on several projects, including Magic: the Gathering and the Sovereign Stone project in cooperation with M. Weiss and T. Hickman. He still cooperated occasionally with TSR. Still active today, he is a living legend and a regular guest at many conventions.

You can’t fail to love Larry Elmore’s work if you have been living those years. I do. And yet, there is something I must spit out, for intellectual honesty. What follows may offend you, but that’s it, this is a personal blog and not a commercial page. We don’t need to be nice, we need to be sincere. And there’s a lot I really don’t like about Elmore’s work, and here’s a list of what it is.

First: drawing from models. Everybody always looks like he’s posing, because he is. Most of group paintings look like group pictures, and they probably were in origin. 

 

Lack of dynamism in characters is one thing, a small one. But there is more about drawing from models: it is good when picturing real stuff, but when eventually stray from reality, everybody can immediately feel it. Vallejo suffered from this, too. Humans and elves were okay, Dwarfs not so much, but it is with Orcs and Dragons and monsters that Elmore’s painting becomes sketchy. Detail stays, it’s just realism that goes out of the window in favour of a comic book feel. It’s true, look at it. Only Frazetta escaped from this curse (because he didn’t draw from models).

 

 

 

 

But that’s overall forgiveable. What really bugs me is something else. It’s the sexy women, often half naked, almost always graced with angelic faces. They, over time, became more and more common. Elmore didn’t invent the sexualization of Fantasy, it had started long before him and was a general trend in 1980s US - just look at comics or cinema. But while this sexualisation was obvious in earlier artists, such as Vallejo and Achilleos with their oily bodies, phallic symbols and girls in pin up poses. Elmore and TSR realized the trend and followed it, but took care to tone it down for young teenagers and their moms. Also, for some reasons, half naked men became more and more rare, but not so with girls.

 

Eventually, this became the standard in the industry on the western side of the Atlantic and, as I said, a whole generation of fans was raised considering this normality. And that’s why John Blanche and his Amazonia Gothique are great. But that’s the subject of another post.