Dragon Art by Clyde Caldwell

Clyde Caldwell is an American fantasy illustrator, born in 1948 in Gastonia, North Carolina. He studied at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and worked as an independent illustrator before joining TSR, the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, in the early 1980s.

Caldwell spent about a decade at TSR alongside painters such as Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, and Keith Parkinson. His best-known painting from those years is the cover of the 1983 adventure Ravenloft, which shows the vampire Strahd von Zarovich above his castle. He went on to paint covers for the Ravenloft line and for the Gazetteer series of game supplements. He also contributed to Dragonlance, including calendar paintings and adventure module covers, and painted covers for Dragon magazine and for TSR's Greyhawk Adventures novels.

Caldwell left TSR in 1992 to work as a freelancer. His other credits include a series of Barsoom covers for Heavy Metal and cards for Magic: The Gathering. His paintings are collected in The Art of Clyde Caldwell (2002), and his work also appears in Masters of Dragonlance Art.

Caldwell is known for confident, glamorous heroines and for dragons with a look all their own. Larry Elmore once described Caldwell's dragons as slimmer and more snake-like than those of other artists, and that sleek, serpentine quality runs through many of the pictures in this gallery.