Why was the 80s/early 90s the golden age for fantasy art?

I bet you also think music used to be better before you were born too.

#sobrave #socontrarian #soedgy #sooriginal

b-b-but /tv/ told me that only reddit is nostalgic for the 80s because they were brainwashed by Stranger Things...

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t. Miley Cyrus apologist

Yeah, everything is better today. Now go suck Jamals cock while you apologize for being white.

/Pol fags are leaking again.

Black people aren't the reason you have a shitty miserable life, you are.

I have a nice life.

/pol/tard pls stop trying to hijack 80s nostalgia

you're giving it a bad name

>Black people aren't the reason you have a shitty miserable life
INDEED ITS THE JOOS FAULT
COME AT ME JIDF

>Why was the 80s/early 90s the golden age for fantasy art?
Before the rise of digital art, artists had to actually know things about art (like how to draw humans and other objects freehand, how lighting works, etc). The rise of digital tools gave mediocre artists shortcuts that allowed them to make images that look impressive on first glance. It's only after you start to look a little closer that you notice all the background objects are just cloned from a single render and there seem to be eight or ten suns because the lighting is all over the place.

This was coupled with the simple fact that artists don't get paid much, so the digital artist who can pump out 10 pictures a week will get more work than the traditional artist who can only produce one (objectively better) picture per week, and the digital artist's art will have 10x the exposure.

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>80s/early 90s
>Everquest was released in 1999
>Words and time are hard for my brain.

It's the style, no the literal year.

then word the OP differently, cause your post was clearly about the historical time period, not about the style

>Those shoulderpads
WoW ruined fantasy.

Fine.

That's nowhere near WoW-levels.

Archetypes instead of ideals.

Art is an inherently subjective experience, but I've always enjoyed simplicity. I don't really have the patience to scan every inch of an image to find tiny goblins or the runes on a sword, though of course I can appreciate the work that just had gone in. I find that 80s fantasy art has that very simple look, your OP image has the two distinct adventurers and the dragon.

Those are fine. Compare those to the fucking gilded dump truck tires everyone in is wearing. Also, holy fuck is the top dwarf so much better. His helmet has horns AND a plumber, nigga be rad as fuck and reminds me of why I liked dwarves back in the day.

It wasn't. That's just rose tinted glasses talking. Lots of art at the time was shit. The pic you posted is, in my opinion, pretty shit.

Most art today is also pretty shit. It's just a different kind of shit on account of the idea of what constitutes "cool stuff" has shifted. Now we get belts, buckles, impractically pointy swords and armors, and ripped and torn clothes that were obviously designed to look good despite being in poor condition.

>80's fantasy aesthetic
>Modern techniques
Yes.

>Hand-drawn
>Pre-Warcraft (and WoW) design
>Matte painting influences
Still, it was far from perfect.

>and ripped and torn clothes that were obviously designed to look good despite being in poor condition.
This annoys me to no fucking end. If you are drawning someone in rags, you better make sure they look like wearing rags and not straight out of tailor.

simpler designs?

>60's style nostalgia practical backdrops
>fantastic sensibilities in terms of design aesthetics confined to practical modern forms
>cocaine, steroids, and superhuman athletes
>no realism fags ruining everything
>narrative through a dynamic image
>great separation between masculine and feminine forms
It's pretty GOAT, even if you don't like the actual drawings.

Wrong. 90s, to the early 2000s was when fantasy art hit its peak. 80s fantasy art was pretty cheesy

And everything went downhill after that simply because it became CGI art, even though not as good, became far cheaper to commission that traditional art.

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Do you have a bigger version of that image, or more? Shit's tight.

also fantasy art thread

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I love the baroque aesthetic of Druillet. I suppose he, and others from Heavy Metal, were an important influence on the 40k art

thats nice, reminds of the stuff kevin o'neill was doing for 2000ad

He probably wasn't.

His aesthetic is theoretically similar to Blanche's earliest works because at that point they both transitioned from the psychedelic Art Nouveau revivalism of the 70s to the ugly punk comic artstyle of the 80s, it's really not something that's specific to Druillet. What is specific to him is the heavy Gustave Doré influence that results in huge dramatic scenes with tons of contorted people, but it's really not something that you can see in 40k art until the late 90s and by that point, the goth subculture had already popularized that kind of artistic reference in fantasy illustrations.

it shouldn't, it's very dissimilar

also on a side note people should read metal zoic its about an eco system of advanced robot animals that are chasing giant robot mastodons and some other shit, its pretty rad

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I've always felt that more fantasy artists need to learn how to capture motion and a sense of action.
This becomes very apparent in a lot of modern fantasy art where any schmuck with a tablet and Photoshop can slap as many lighting effects, filters, neon colors and motion blur into their images, but still can't pose their subjects in a way that conveys a sense of movement.
And often never learned proper human proportions, either.

They knew how to keep things wyrd

>And often never learned proper human proportions, either.
This.

It's the same problem that modern anime "artists" learned to draw by aping anime, whereas the actual artists they're aping learned to draw by studying real life.

>whereas the actual artists they're aping learned to draw by studying real life.
I'm pretty sure most manga artists went to art school

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Not previous poster but here you go

We are asking those that are not underage retards.

>thinks "retarded amounts of spikes and skulls" is peak art
>is a 40Kid
Like pottery

Depending how we define fantasy, romanticism art is good source of inspiration.

It is fantasy friend, on bigger one you can see dead priest of Sigmar.

nani

I'm pretty sure that's what he meant. That most of the professionals drawing manga and anime learned proper proportions and perspective from a proper institution before breaking the rules in stylized anime forms. They're just breaking the rules in a controlled fashion.
Not all, but most fanartists tend to learn by just drawing in the anime style and never learning the right rules of art and never improving on those fundentals, even when their are looks hyper detailed from all the digital tools they use with it.

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>you will never have a head as big as the black wizard

DEEDOO DEEDOO DEEDOO :_:

youtube.com/watch?v=pYpgXqdXW5w

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its not all bad with digital art.

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No digital drawing programs?

I mean its pretty fucking obvious.

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>No cheap loner artist slave labour
>Digital programs and internet in general broaden art availability
>WoW
>All the old artists die like little bitches
prety self explanatory.

i disagree i think its just people being old and not liking the current fashion. there is a tonne of amazing fantasy artwork that isn't WoW shoulder pads and poor proportions

Style and Medium.

Modern fantasy stuff tends to have a cartoonish/anime influence to it in how characters are proportioned and how their faces look.

Older fantasy has a lot more of a human quality, It's easy for me to imagine a real person looking like that, even if most of the men are massive body builders and the women are thicc babes.

Then tack on the fact that the older stuff was drawn by people who studied very hard learning traditional art technique and drawing a lot of realism before moving onto stylized fantasy, whereas this digital tablet age makes it really easy for people without that classical training to "fake it".

I won't pretend either one is all-good or all-bad, but I've yet to see a modern Frazetta

While that image is definitely terrific artwork, that's some really obnoxious and unpleasing design.

i think these days theres just so much artwork. in the 80's you needed to actually be a professional artist to have your art projected out into the world, these days any schmuck can start a DE page, or a blog catch and vomit their bile onto the internet

really? i like it, gets the obnoxious cruel gremlin thing going well, the design promotes the personality of the character and all that

It was the golden age because Frazetta, Vallejo and Bell were drawing badass half-naked muscular hero's and heroines and nobody was fucking moaning about body image on the internet

That's part of it, but it's the classic problem that you only want to remember the good shit from back in the day. We don't have everyone's shitty sketches from that time. There's no filter for that on the internet.

christ this thread got cancerous fast.
makes me wonder why some people bother even coming to this board anymore

Realism is not taught anywhere anymore. You can see it in modern western animation as well, no one has a clue how to draw a walking human body.

Of course, blindly calling all of anything bad or good based on whether its digital or analog would be stupid.

It's just an art style for the most part. And digital art in general which just comes off as flat after it undergoes dozens of filters. There are still good artists like Justin Sweet where you can tell he was inspired by Vallejo, but I really like his much moodier paintings.

Said the underage moron that smells

How dare you call Sam Fox's butt cancerous?

I don't think I've ever seen anyone moaning about body image.

Then again, I don't intentionally seek out websites with contrary opinions to my own just to get upset about them and/or repost them on my favorite websites to get (you)s from people who think like me.

these days for me there's so much awesome work being done in 3d these days that doesn't get appreciated.a lot of it just gets sucked into game or film assets and people just dont appreciate the artistry that went into some of this stuff

i quoted the wrong post because im retarded

>golden age of fantasy art
>posts Elmore
It couldn't end fast enough.

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>implying identity politics isn't the most poisonous form of politics to involve in art
>implying censorship and abandonment of ancient ideals, especially in fucking fantasy, is acceptable
>implying viewing everything through a modern moralistic lens isn't the literal worst way to handle fantasy and worlds beyond our conception

Not even that user but come the fuck on.

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If you fine gents ever get the chance to read Lone Sloane then do. Tis some fine sci f indeed.

>People disagree with me!
>HOW DARE THEY HOLD THEIR OWN OPINIONS! WHAT KIND OF CANCEROUS BOARD IS THIS?!
>NOT ON MUH TEEGEE

So yes, you are a underage retard with bad b.o.

Pathetic.

Are you an oldfag? Is that why you're so upset? Or are you just a underaged b& like us trying to fit in by calling out other people?

>muh wrong generayshiun

You must drown in pussy.

What a weird fucking insult. Are you legitimately on the spectrum?

>If I haven't seen it it must not exist lol

The Flat Earth Society called, they have a bridge to sell you.

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Just someone tired of retards talking about a time before they were born.
Nope, you just really need a bath.

>M-muh badass methul *Shakes girly hair*
ITT

>m-muh generic insult instead of posting a picture to counter this claim
>M-muh body shaming

No I don't think so. The 80s was cursed with an obsession with certain very 80s esque aesthetic (see jazzercise drow) and a stodgy conservatism that was good for realism but bad for innovation.

I do think fantasy in general had a greater spark before the late 90s. There was a certain sincerity that I think has been somewhat lost, and people kind of "got it" more. Which lead to more legit art.

While I think the criticism of modern art ITT are dead on I propose we are in the hidden shangri-la age. There's a lot of mediocre video game inspired shit, but a small cadre of artists are producing some of the best and most dynamic stuff ever. You see it sometimes in really good magic cards. Some of those obscure asian guys are amazing.

Best fantasy helmet styles right here