Dungeons and Dragons Art Review - Tony Szczudlo

 Where did Tony Szczudlo come from? Is that last name even real? 

I was thinking about this because my daughter previously drew fantastical scenes and stories starting from around age four. They were really cool and had a lot of action. Now she mostly sceteches just individual people or faces, or just hands, just feet, trying to figure out how to accurately capture the human body and human movement. 

So, this reminded me of TSR's big four oil painters from The Pit - Jeff Easley, Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell, and Keith Parkinson. Most of their work is either static or involves action in a fairly limited scope without much detail going on in the background or the margins. Easley departs from this quite a bit, but his detail washes into blurs in the background very rapidly. Parkinson has a few more active pieces with a wide scale. Elmore has some really nice dynamic pieces, but they focus on just a handful of characters and the backgrounds tend to be much more static or, to be very precise, scenic landscapes. 

That's where Tony Szczudlo comes in. He did paintings for TSR's Birthright Dungeons and Dragons setting. This would have been later 1990s, not too long before Wizards of the Coast bought TSR. Birthright started as a deluxe boxed set. Szczudlo's cover is a masterpiece in its scope, color, and detail. It captures what so many of our D&D games tried to build to or include, these massed combats and castle sieges, the player characters doing their best to contribute to victory or just survive. In general, Szczudlo's painting style actually reminds me of Jeff Easley in terms of round, constrained forms, and blurred or impressionistic backgrounds. But Szczudlo's mid-grounds have so much more going on, and his foregrounds are so full of little details. Szczudlo's work is also much more visceral and horrifying. He love's the blood, the screams of pain and terror. Because of this, a lot of his paintings and drawings are not up my alley. I don't go in for horror, blood, and gore. But his Birthright paintings are awesome. It's a shame he worked for TSR as it was sinking under its own bloated weight of settings and splat books. I would have loved to see what else Szczudlo could have contributed to outside of Birthright.  Wizards didn't use him at all. Maybe Szczudlo's aesthetic was too disturbing to parents. I'll include one of the covers for another Birthright project he did to give a feel for it. 

(Actually, doing a little extra sifting through the internet shows that Szczudlo did paint for Wizards, but small pieces for card art, and nothing visceral.)Now, let's take a look, shall we? 

Tony Szczudlo painting his cover for Birthright. 

Detail of the corner Szczudlo is working on with the first photo.

Complete Birthright Painting by Tony Szczudlo. Scale here does not do it justice. 

Cover to a Birthright companion book Legends of the Hero King

And now some paintings that approach Szczudlo's Brightright painting, but are simply no match in scope and detail.

Jeff Easley comes closest, but for all that is going on here, for the most part it's dozens of figures with swords at the ready, Laurana the sole exception as she cuts down a draconian in the foreground. I believe this was the original cover art to Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis's first ever Dragonlance novel Dragons of Autumn Twilight. 

One of my favorite's from Keith Parkinson. I wish I knew the title. The idea here is similar to Szczudlo's Birthright painting, but the scale here is very personalized, only focused on the two figure's in the foreground. There is a sense of battle taking place in the background, just enough of a hint. This is the cover to an interior book in TSR's first boxed set for the AD&D Forgotten Realms setting.

A classic from Clyde Caldwell (I pulled this directly from his website), the cover to the first AD&D Dragonlance module, Dragons of Despair. This is the most action I've seen in a Caldwell painting, and the background of ruins and waterfalls is quite stunning. But in terms of scope, it's a far cry from Szczudlo's Birthright painting. 

This is the only Larry Elmore painting I can think of that works at a similar scale to Szczudlo's Birthright. I know its title as The Savage Frontier, the cover to a Forgotten Realms setting book. It may also be a cover to one of the AD&D high-level adventures for the Bloodstone Lands. I love this painting and we referenced it frequently as we thought of settings and what the composition might be to a dark army we would have to face off against. That said, Elmore has many nicely posed figures with little dynamism and no violence.