I'd agree with everything that's been said here so far. Strong, clean graphics that hopefully help tell a story. I'd also add Mike Jackson's work. I've always thought the MegaTraveller Journal was one of the best products ever done for Traveller. The artwork, fonts, layout... just great quality all around. Rob Caswell was the art director, so he clearly brought a lot to the table.
Some of my pet artistic peeves:
Static figures, as mentioned previously
Ripping off from other popular sci fi sources - The MegaTraveller Imperial Encyclopedia has an image by William Keith showing a spaceship that is clearly a Y-wing from Star Wars. The original Zhodani book has two images by Steve Venters that are clearly taken from images of Athena from Battlestar Galactica and Ralph McQuarrie's painting of Luke Skywalker getting out of his crashed snowspeeder. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem reinterpreting someone else's photo or using some image as an overlay to save time. I think Keith and Venters are exceptional artists. Paying homage is one thing, but to take from the genre you are creating art for seems, I don't know... incestuous?... and maybe a little disrespectful of your audience.
Poor composition - sometimes this is the artist's fault, sometimes it's how an image may have been cropped to fit the space within a publication. Still, this is first semester art basics.
Poor adoption of computer graphics - Take a look at a Traveller's Digest while they were running their feature adventure, prior to issue 12. The character profiles include small head shots that are extremely pixelated and clunky looking. I mean no offense to Joe Fugate as an artist either - whatever software he was using at the time just wasn't up to the task (unless they were just bad scans), and the inclusion in their magazine seemed more like an ego thing than a good editorial decision. That they would be included in a magazine with a cover by David Dietrick and interior art by Rob Caswell made it all the more jarring.
Not understanding grayscale balance and contrast - A good color image does not necessarily make a good black and white image. I'm looking at GURPS Traveller Starports right now and much of the space related artwork is computer rendered. I can't speak to what the original artwork looks like, but when converted to black and white for printing, many images are washed out fields of varying shades of gray. Very little contrast makes for an image that is difficult to read.
Mix of rendering styles in one image - GURPS Traveller Starports has starship deck plans with a mix of shaded "3D" components, such as drives, mixed with flat graphics. While not terrible, they just look like the artist took whatever was available and threw them into the mix. Lazy. Also, the hex linework is too heavy.
Artistic laziness - If you can, compare the Mora Imperial Downport map (GURPS Traveller Starports) versus the Imperial Naval Depot map (Megatraveller Journal #3, by Caswell). Buildings in the first are drawn as a series of haphazardly placed rectangles and squares. They don't give the feeling of a city at all. Rob's buildings are drawn with intention, and give the sense of roads, organized building clusters, etc. Huge difference. Both artists were drawing the same shape, but one was drawing rectangles while the other was drawings buildings. Sometimes quality takes more time.
In another computer generated image I can't place at the moment, a woman in slacks, high heels, and a sports jacket is shown walking across the tarmac while cargo is being loaded. Sure, she
could be the ship owner coming to make a surprise inspection. More likely she is a stock 3D model dropped into the scene because the artist couldn't or wouldn't create something more appropriate.
I could rip on the graphics of GURPS Traveller Starports all day, but not the hand-drawn work, which is quite good. In the end it is still one of my favorite books, which is why it was sitting right next to me as I started writing this. If you have poor art, better have amazing written content.
No disrespect is meant to any of the artists or artwork I've mentioned here. If it is a pet peeve of mine it is because I've recognized it as a shortcoming in my own work and something I may still be guilty of. I can only imagine how difficult it is to be an artist in general, and even more so one in the RPG industry. If any professional artists are reading this, my hat's off to you all. Thanks for the many years of inspiration!
Finally, for a humorous look at what's wrong with Traveller art, check out SomethingAwful.com's
"WTF, Traveller Art?"
- Robert
