Homage: 1985
For all subscribers: Here is your exclusive, advance look at the cartoon homage from Episode 13.
This week’s cartoon homage is to the cover of 1985’s Unearthed Arcana, painted by the great Jeff Easley. Jeff is one of the people who set the artistic tone in the early years of Dungeons & Dragons.
During my conversation with Todd Lockwood in Episode 13, he talked about what it was like to work alongside Jeff Easley. He said that Jeff would spend hours, sometimes whole days with a piece of cover art in the sketch phase, just looking at it, pondering, considering, and then looking at the sketch for another few hours. “Then I’d go out to lunch,” Todd said, “and when I came back an hour or two later, it seemed like the painting was suddenly half done.”
Having taken a turn at capturing the spirit of Jeff’s UA cover, I’m even MORE amazed at Todd’s story.
After last week’s homage I THOUGHT I was going to have a slightly easier, quicker time this week’s homage to Larry Elmore’s cover for Dragons of Autumn Twilight—which featured three characters and a dragon in an atmospheric landscape—I thought I was giving myself a break with this cover. After all, it only has one character (who’s only shown from the waist up), and the setting is a shadowed laboratory. Even the view out the window is just a clear sky with just two crescent moons for details.
Oh boy, was I mistaken!
Drawing this week’s cartoon homage took me half again longer than last week’s did … and the more I worked on it, the more details I realized I was overlooking. I could have spent TWICE this long on it. But I think I did capture SOME of the spirit of Easley’s piece. And I’ve gained an added respect for someone I already put on a pretty high pedestal.
As a subscriber to this newsletter, you’re seeing this art three days before it is released for general consumption. You also have the option to buy an art print of this or any of the cartoon homages (and if you’re a paid subscriber, you get a discount on those purchases).
Please share this newsletter with friends who are also fans of Dungeons & Dragons. The best promotion we can get is word of mouth … and your opinion matters! Drop us a line if you have any comments or suggestions for the newsletter or the livestream shows.