New Art, Please

[tagthewhale]

Okay, enough is enough.

I've gotten pretty much every 4E product since release, with the exception of the adventures.  And I've been more than a little annoyed at the repeats of artwork in those books.

Wizards has posted the art gallery from Arcane Power, and once again, there's a ton of artwork in there that's reprinted from previous sources.  As in

Comments

[mysticalforest]

Word.

[seankreynolds]

Mearls has posted something about this in a response to one of Eric's blogs. Something about how "sometimes the art comes in and we're not satisfied with it and we decide to run old art in its place."

To which I respond: "You're Wizards of the Coast. You pay artists more than anyone else in the industry. If you don't like what artists are sending you, send it back. You wouldn't re-run old game text because you were unhappy with a text turnover, why should art be any different?"

[tagthewhale]

Ahem.

What?(!?!?!?!)

Work that comes in so late in the process that you don't have time to review it and send it back for a do-over indicates:

1) You aren't commissioning enough "stock" pieces of art to keep on hold for this sort of situation,

2) Your artists aren't meeting their deadlines,

3) Your deadlines are too close to when you need to sent things to layout,

AND / OR

4) You need to fire some artists.

There are tons of capable, punctual artists chomping at the bit for the kind of pay that Wizards doles out. Maybe Wizards needs to clear out some of their art pool and start finding more reliable artists, who can make deadlines, anticipate need, and fix problems before they become disasters.

>10% of artwork being unsatisfactory is, in fact, a bad thing. But it's unsatisfactory to the READER to make us pay for art we've already paid for, even though WotC owns it outright.

Grr.

[seankreynolds]

You're not the only one to be talking about this.
http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/254730-arcane-power-art-gallery-welcome-back-old-friends.html