Art in 3.5 in comparison: Why so bad?

[TheDarkSaint]

Why is a great deal of the art in 3.5 books just so...bad?

I played 2nd Ed during middle and high school and I was enthralled by the art. I loved the terrifying red dragon of Monster Manual, the female archer being ambushed by a giant skeleton on a snowy plain and the female swordsman who defeated an ogre and held his nose-ring while his club was in tatters around him. It was rich, vibrant and completely different than 1st edition or 3.5.

What happened? I look at the art of 4.0 and I see a noticeable difference. In 3.5 I see all kinds of awkward body positions, weird proportions and hardly any full page art work.


Anyone have an inside scoop to this? I'm very curious.

[jedipotter]

Art is subjective, of course. I love the goofy 1E art, for example.


The main reason for less artwork is cost. And that does effect quality too. Good artists cost money, but any artist can draw a pitcure.

Also, 3E was made to be more of a offical rule book for mature readers, not a graphic novel. So there is a lot less art. 4E was targgeted at the younger comic book and video game gamer, so had lots more art.

And 3E cramed all the Core rules in three books, so had to leave out lots of art for game content. 4E spread the ''core'' rules out over several books, so they had lots and lots of free space for art.

[Rejusu]

While the actual artwork in 3.5 can be a bit hit and miss I love the design of the books compared to 4E. The majority of the 3.5 books are designed to look and feel like big fantasy tomes where as 4E just has this boring comic book style. I dunno, when I open a D&D rulebook I want to feel like I'm opening a book of magic. And for that the styling is more important than the artwork, and I think 3.5 did that right.

[Darrin]

[Warning: I know nothing about artwork or art design, so this is all largely just speculative BS.]

In 2E, there was a small but dedicated stable of "D&D Artists" who did most of the iconic artwork. Back then, fantasy artists only had about three markets to sell their artwork: RPG books, magazine covers, and sci fi/fantasy book covers.

In between 2E and 3E, a bit of a nuke went off in the fantasy art community: Magic: the Gathering created an entirely new market with an insatiable demand for fantasy art... and not just the big cover pieces, but smaller stuff, even sketches/doodles/throwaways. This both expanded the market of available artists, but it also scrambled around art budgets and the prices for fantasy artwork. You've got a lot more artists producing a much wider variety of "quality", and what they're getting paid is also thrown out of whack. Paper costs were also going up at that time, and line managers were trying to make sure the books they put out were going to keep them on the right side of the bottom line. Hardback/softback? Color cover, b&w interior? Lots of tough choices, and never enough money in the art budget.

At the time TSR saw an opportunity with the CCG market booming, and tried to jump in with Spellfire. Pretty much all of the Spellfire cards used recycled art. Some covers were just chopped up piecemeal, taking a character here, a magic item there, etc. They thought their huge library of cover artwork would give them an edge. Instead, they were mocked. *MERCILESSLY*.

When 3E launched, the artistic landscape had completely changed. The big fantasy cover artists were still there, but the big cover pieces take a lot of time compared to an army of newer artists cranking out smaller pieces for CCGs. A lot of the smaller RPG companies liked having a wider choice of newer, cheaper artists to work with, but there was an extremely wide variety of quality, and something of a "you get what you pay for" market. WotC had a considerably larger budget for 3E, so they did something a little different: no more big cover pieces, instead we've got "faux-realistic tomes". The interior artwork is a mix of full-color set pieces, character portraits, B&W artwork, and "sketchbook-style" illustrations to give a sort of "da Vinci's secret notebook" theme to the core hardbacks. This was a step up from the 2E hardbacks, which featured one big full cover for the main rulebooks, a few big cover-art style pieces in the hardbacks, but mostly B&W or two-color art pieces throughout the sourcebooks. You also still see the hardback/softcover divide here, as outside the 3.0 core the "Ampersand & Ampersand" style sourcebooks were all softcovers with one color piece on front but B&W art throughout, which was at least a step up from the 2E "handbooks" that often featured no color artwork at all.

When WotC relaunched 3.5, the core rulebooks kept the "faux-realistic" cover art, but the new standard for sourcebooks was "Hardback or Nothing". This was something of an economic decision based on rising paper costs, as the softcovers just weren't selling well enough to justify the print runs. Now all of the 96/128-page softcovers had to be repackaged as hardbacks with at least 160+ pages. Full-color cover piece is now mostly a character portrait with a large faux-realistic frame, and inside you've got a mix of full-color portraits, some cover art cropped into the text, B&W art, sketches, etc.

This model is largely geared toward relying on the growing stable of experienced M:tG artists that are used to drawing individual characters, monsters, items, etc. And here is where you're probably getting a lot of "bad artwork" alarm bells. CCGs have "trained" the RPG audience to get an illustration of every creature, character, magic item. So the WotC books largely follow that model: here's the PrC, here's the sample character artwork. Here's the monster/magic item/spell, here's the artwork for it. This model demands a lot of small, individualized pieces. Given the art budgets, the line managers can't pay Larry Elmore his "cover piece price" every time they need to know what a Staff of Wobbling looks like. So you get sort of a scattershot of a bunch of different artists doing smaller pieces. You also get a much wider variety of quality. It's kind of the result of the fallout from the M:tG boom and the economic realities of trying to print paper books without going bankrupt in a market thrown a bit topsy-turvy with digital publishing/delivery.

{{scrubbed}}

[TheDarkSaint]

Darrin, that was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! :)

[Agincourt]

Personally, I think 3.5 art is a vast improvement over 2nd edition. By way of comparison I'm comparing the 2E PHB with the 3.5 PHB.

Let's start with 2E. The vast majority of the 2E PHB is in 3 colors: black, white, and blue. By my count, there are 8 full-page color pictures in the book. Outside of those 8 pages though, there are just those 3 colors, or perhaps a fourth color if you wand to include gray as a color.

There are a few black and white pictures scattered throughout the book, but about half of the art is done in blue-and-white. Those blue-and-white pictures are, by my reckoning, cheesy. There's no shading or detail. It looks like an artist was given a couple hours to knock something out. Frequently, those pictures seem to have no relation to the text, and some of those pictures, I'm not even sure what they are supposed to depict. (For example, I'm looking at page 213 at this moment. There's a picture of what appears to be 3 swords, but I have no idea what they are doing there, or if there is any relation to the text.)

Most of the rest of the art is black-and-white. Frequently, I have no idea what its relation to the text is either, but I find it less off-putting.

The full page color pictures I generally like, but I cannot see any attempt to integrate them with the text. They just are scattered haphazard throughout the book. It's like the book designer was given some pictures of fantasy events and then randomly spaced them in the book. Perhaps the designer chose the best art, but other than that, little thought seems to have gone into it. For example, on page 60, there is an interesting picture of a spellcaster of some variety casting a spell from a staff. However it has no relation to the text before or after it. It's just plopped in the middle of a section on nonweapon proficiencies, and there is no explanatory text as to what this spellcaster is doing.

3.5, on the other hand, has color throughout the book. Every page has a border that includes multiple colors, but more importantly, the art seems to depict something that relates to the text. Nearly every picture has a caption explaining its relevance. There are not any full page pictures in the book (maybe this is what you are looking for?) but every picture has a purpose. There are sketches of various races, of most of the weapons, and a large percentage of the equipment. The purpose of this art is pretty clear: to show exactly what some of this stuff looks like.

The color pictures are evenly distributed and, more importantly, seems to have a purpose. You have battle grid diagrams in the combat chapter, pictures of each base class, and pictures of all the gods' holy symbols. I cannot find a single picture where I am unsure what it depicts.

I think it comes down to this: The full page pictures in 2E, the artist seems to have been given a free hand. Draw whatever. Use your imagination, and we'll stick it in the book somewhere. In 3.5, the artists seem to have been given specific instructions. Draw this character. Show the players what a greataxe looks like. If you like your RPG art to pique your imagination, perhaps you prefer 2E. If you like your RPG art to depict potentially confusing ideas, or give the players a base point to integrate what something looks like into the broader picture, you probably prefer 3.5.

[BWR]

I think it comes down to this: The full page pictures in 2E, the artist seems to have been given a free hand. Draw whatever. Use your imagination, and we'll stick it in the book somewhere. In 3.5, the artists seem to have been given specific instructions. Draw this character. Show the players what a greataxe looks like. If you like your RPG art to pique your imagination, perhaps you prefer 2E. If you like your RPG art to depict potentially confusing ideas, or give the players a base point to integrate what something looks like into the broader picture, you probably prefer 3.5.

And for this reason I generally prefer 2E art.

[Skysaber]

Yeah, I prefer fantasy style art over 'faux-realism' for my fantasy rpgs.

Actually, it's worse even than that. Look at the art in the player's handbook, at all of the stitches, buckles and rags those character portraits are wearing. It's half Michael Jackson, half Mad Max.

It's hard to call it realism when no culture has historically ever dressed like that. It breaks my suspension of disbelief. The sorcerer's outfit consists entirely of buckles. And look at that patchwork skirt the bald guy is wearing!

For that reason I've often heard 3.x style artwork referred to as 'fantasy-punk', an attempt to draw cyberpunk gritty using fantasy themes.

And it's ugly. Given the opportunity, I'd pay for a text-only version of the book over that.

[Zanos]

It's hard to call it realism when no culture has historically ever dressed like that. It breaks my suspension of disbelief. The sorcerer's outfit consists entirely of buckles. And look at that patchwork skirt the bald guy is wearing!

The sorcerer is a pretty bad example, considering it mentions later in the PHB that the characters outfit is deliberately eccentric:

Hennet the sorcerer wears an eclectic,
makeshift outfit that is different from day to
day, suggesting his chaotic nature.

As for my personal opinion, there are an outrageous number of pockets. I like it overall though.

[Skysaber]

The sorcerer is a pretty bad example, considering it mentions later in the PHB that the characters outfit is deliberately eccentric

The sorcerer is only marginally worse than the rest of the character portraits, most of whom dress in rags, and still is one example out of dozens in that book, and hundreds overall.

Since when did orcs look like the Incredible Hulk? Oh, that's right, since Warcraft. But frankly, I preferred the pig-snouted cretins from earlier eds. Orcs, in my opinion, should not look like Mr. Universe when thematically people in the campaign worlds are supposed to be mowing them down like grass in order to survive. It's a logical disconnect, and it's disturbing my ability to accept it as fantasy.

The armor section! Oh! The *armor* section! Where every suit looks like it was stapled together by blind monks of an anti-technology god using whatever garbage lay close at hand!

Since those drawing of breastplates and leather armor are supposed to give you an idea of, you know, breastplates and leather armor why are they ALL OF THEM patchwork collections of random metal bits with no clear distinguishing characteristics? What's the difference between banded armor, split and half plate? You'll never tell by those drawings. Just differently stapled together random metal bits pulled out of a garbage can by those monks.

The purpose of art is to assist the reader to embrace the theme. 3.x art forces me to reject the very themes they are supposed to be supporting!

[Hiro Protagonest]

The only book older than 3.5 is the AD&D dungeon master's guide which was given to me by a neighbor. And while I don't really like the skills of the artists, the style is definitely better. I've seen a lot of Larry Elmore's gallery though and he's my favorite. 4e consistently had high-quality pictures, but the style is a matter of contention (personally I like a lot of the stuff 4e did to make the world feel interesting, but then I am a teenager, and I've really gotten into video games).

[Sir Chuckles]

I like some of the weapon art, though as even an amatuer ancient weapon enthusiast, I want to chuck the book at the artist from time to time.

But I'll have to agree on one big thing:
That Sorcerer makes me cry.

I've got the AD&D Deities and Demigods in my lap right now, and it's strange when compared to 3.5's art.

It's both better in some areas, and worse in others. Like comparing my sketches to a professional artist's, but said artist was underpaid and uninvested in the material. (AD&D::3.5)