While I'm not going to claim that Larry Elmore is a real classic of the fine art tradition, he is a great commercial artist, and some of his D&D artwork from the 80s is rightly considered classic pieces of the fantasy genre. In particular, I think his BECMI covers and the original Dragonlance novel covers are landmark pieces.
Apparently, he volunteered to do the art for the new Dragonlance trilogy written by Weiss and Hickman, but was basically told by WotC that they don't want any white male artists doing their work. So, instead, we got this:
Like I said, again, Elmore may not be Raphael, Rembrandt or Michelangelo, but c'mon. That crap is terrible. Not only is it technically poor, with only vaguely anatomically correct proportions or faces, but it's also objectively kind of ugly and deliberately so in many ways. It isn't terrible from a landscape perspective, although nothing special, but the characters and the dragon, and the posing and the composition is all pretty bad. As commercial art it also fails, because it's neither exciting, attractive nor even memorable.
And frankly, the dragon's head only looks cool because the artist copied the design pioneered by Sam Wood and Todd Lockwood in the 2000 Monster Manual.
Although not super high resolution, this triptych style approach to the three covers shows art that is attractive, interesting, and commercially looks really good; it was an important part of turning the Dragonlance Chronicles into the bestselling landmark trilogy of novels that it was.
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