Dragon Art by Larry Elmore

Larry Elmore is an American fantasy artist, born in 1948 in Louisville, Kentucky. After a stint in the military he worked as a freelance illustrator, and his art appeared in magazines such as National Lampoon and Heavy Metal before TSR, the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, hired him as a staff artist in 1981.

Elmore spent six years at TSR, and his paintings helped define how a generation pictured the game. His cover for the 1983 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, with a lone warrior facing a red dragon, is one of the best-known images in role-playing games. He also created the early concept art used to pitch the Dragonlance saga inside TSR, and he painted the cover of the first Dragonlance novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight. He has said he is probably better known for Dragonlance than for anything else. Readers of Dragon magazine also knew him for SnarfQuest, the humorous comic he wrote and drew for its pages.

After leaving TSR in 1987, Elmore worked as a freelancer for many game and book publishers. His credits include the cover of FASA's Shadowrun, cover art for EverQuest, and cards for Magic: The Gathering. Collections of his work include 20 Years of Elmore (2005) and a large career retrospective funded on Kickstarter in 2013.

Elmore paints in a warm, realistic style with a storyteller's eye. His heroes look like real people, his dragons have weight and presence, and his scenes often feel like a moment caught in the middle of an adventure.