D&D General When Did Digital Art Become A Thing?

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

4E looks digital anyway on the interiors.

Alot of earl 3.0 looks hand drawn eg the sepia stuff but I'm not 100% sure.

You do need to be careful with that assumption. Hand drawn can easily be digital. Many artist do (or at least did) make digital art like they do traditional art. Starting with a digital sketch (sometimes very detailed) before adding colors, shading, texture, etc. Heck, my partner has purchased digital art that was hand drawn - just on a digital tablet.

Not saying this was the case for 3/3.5 art, but just because something is hand drawn doesn't mean it was traditional art.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

I literally just did. The 3.5e PHB cover looks like a bad clay model pretending to be a real book cover. The 3.0 PHB isn't better. Both don't look like metal. They look like clay or plastic formed into an imitation of metal.


Not particularly; I did say I wasn't really a fan of the 4e PHB cover, just that I preferred it more than what I consider the really terrible PHB/DMG/etc. cover "art" that we got from 3e.

However, I love several artists that were employed widely throughout 4e's run, such as William O'Connor (love most of his work), Jason Engle (ditto), Ben Wootten (not super prolific but damn good at what he does), Steve Argyle (c'mon, you can't tell me his depiction of Bane is anything less than epic), Anne Stokes (her eladrin really sell how alien the "high elf" archetype should be, while still being ethereally beautiful, and I like her dragons), and Eva Widermann (there's a...smoothness to her art I just really like.)

Having WAR covers was pretty much par for the course for late-2000s early-2010s TTRPG books. He was friggin' everywhere, to my chagrin. He does do good work, but much of his stuff is just waaaay too overwrought.


Whereas for me, I found 3e at best a mixed bag, while 4e was mostly good (other than Mr. Reynolds' work, which I am not particularly keen on), and 5e has gone back to being a mixed bag but for very different reasons. Some 5e art is really quite excellent. Some of it is painful to my eyes and soul.

And I just...I don't get the love for artists like Elmore or (especially) Erol Otus. I really really don't. As in if I'd been around at the time the latter's work was in vogue, it would have actively reduced my interest in playing D&D. When folks heap praise on it for being what made them think of fantasy, I genuinely just...don't understand. I doubt I ever will.

This whole reply is pretty much my thoughts exactly.