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| AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! |
I wrote yesterday about the world of Magnamund featured in the Lone Wolf gamebooks. The setting may not be very divergent from traditional medieval Europe-style fantasy, but the artwork featured in those pages always seemed exotic and strange to me. I would say it is right up there with the work of Erol Otus and the other artists whose work was featured in the early editions of Basic D&D. You know, the art that evokes a more odd, bizarre, alien version of D&D than that of Elmore and others such as Parkinson and Caldwell.
I have to say I appreciate the "strange" art of Otus and his ilk as well as the "fantasy realism" of Elmore and his peers. Neither is "better" than the other, in my opinion. They represent different approaches, different styles, of D&D.
Which brings me to Gary Chalk. To me, he stands up there with Russ Nicholson's work as examples of the finely detailed and somewhat bizarre art found in 1980's British fantasy roleplaying. I was highly entertained when I saw the Chalk illo I included at the top of this post! This piece, like most of Mr. Chalk's other work, really inspires me!
A thousand times yes to this. If there's one thing the Internet's missing, it's a decent collection/gallery of Chalk's classic work. I'd love to see not just his Lone Wolf pieces, but the illos he did for other RPG lines and for White Dwarf back in the day, along with his more recent stuff (which is also great).
ReplyDeleteI put a post a while back praising his work; unfortunately, most of the lone wolf stuff out there is very low-res:
http://shirosrpg.blogspot.com/2011/02/in-praise-of-80s-british-fantasy.html
I've always been a fan of his architectural vignettes just as much as his character and action pieces:
http://twitpic.com/aj8u75