Larry Elmore

So whether you're just beginning to dabble your toes in the collodion ethers, or you're a seasoned silver bath expert, hang on and see what develops with 10 Questions.

In this episode, we're heading to the northeast to talk to an artist who came to Collodion the long way around by drawing, painting, printmaking, silversmithing, furniture building, sculpture.

And then once he saw other people pouring plates, decided he had to do it himself.

By day, he has spent nearly 30 years as a senior museum preparator at the Yale Center for British Art.

It's like what was in the camera, you know, was opposite the sitter and sort of saw them and recorded their image in silver where we record you know, memories in, in our neurons or whatever.

And, you know, it's a witness to that sort of moment in time and that person.

And, and so there's this special kind of, I don't know, power that it possesses or like this relevance to the to that person that you know it's not the same with a drawing or a painting or a digital photograph you know it's it's just there's there's these layers of separation whether it's the artist's hand or whatever in a painting or you know going from a negative to a print you know it's not the same.

It

Um, and then, and then after that, um, came the two books of The Legacy of Gird, um, which were these, these two here.

So Liar's Oath and Surrender None, um, with a Gary Rudell cover and a Larry Elmore cover, um, one each on, on both of those.

Um, really, really, really great covers.

Elizabeth's had, had, had good covers, uh, good luck with covers I think, um, with us.

This is...

Not only is it something I designed, but no, no, that, that looks like me, the art is based on me, and it's, it's something I designed and, oh, I'm in here." And that really was well-received, and we had lots of, lots of people from, you know, Larry Elmore and, uh, you know, uh, uh, Ed Greenwood and Zeb Cook and, uh, a billion other people, Skip Williams, et cetera, and, uh, Tim Task, um, all join us, as well as, you know, some, some, uh, newer, newer designers and folks as well, uh, uh, which was great.

And we really enjoyed that.

But, oh, [laughs] we, we also used a very silly...

No way

...

Larry Elmore was, like, 30 miles away, so I drove to his house.

Yeah.

It's not like today.

Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell.

Exactly, all those guys were there.

Yeah.

Legally, that was all speculation.

yeah i i remember that that being one of the gripes against tsr back before they collapsed that the artists that were making dungeons of dragons art didn't get uh keep their original work so like um so all those famous artists back during the tsr days uh like larry elmore and um Clyde Caldwell and all those guys, the art they made for D and D became property of TSR.

And it wasn't until TSR collapsed that they were able to like sell prints of their, the artwork that they made back then.

Um, so, um, That's that's something that TSR was like heavily criticized for back in the day.

they had a super upgrade to the art.

And then you have like Larry Elmore doing the art.

Which is great too, and it's very 80s.

It's much better in many respects.

The original Defenders of the Realm came out in 2010 from Richard Lanius.

The artwork is from Larry Elmore.

You may not recognize the name, but you definitely recognize the artwork as being the very classic, iconic D&D artwork.

So...

So I was excited as well, Tim, seeing this come out.

Now...

Because Larry Elmore is one of the greatest artists in D&D and board gaming and RPGs of all time, I'm not surprised or disappointed necessarily that they went in a different direction because you have to, right? You either need to get Larry Elmore to come back and use his artwork or do something different.

So this version for me is quasi-fantasy American anime looking, but Which, again, is not a bad thing necessarily, but it doesn't necessarily inspire me to want to have this edition.

I'm really good friends with Todd Lockwood.

Me and Larry Elmore did a project together back in 2015.

Drew Baker, Lars Grant West is doing my cover art for that.

Jason Engle, Cyril van der Hagen.

He's probably one of the number one fantasy illustrators in the game.

I'm really good friends with Todd Lockwood.

Me and Larry Elmore did a project together back in 2015.

You know, Drew Baker, Lars Grant West is doing my cover art for that.

They came up with this entire sort of Bible of lore and history to this world.

They reached out to Larry Elmore, who was one of the staff painters at the time, told him all about the world.

He got crazy excited and just did a whole bunch of comp sketches at the time, little paintings that he would put together.

And then they got all the information.