Here's a post I wrote, scrapped completely, and wrote again. It's dedicated to Steven Fabian's interior artwork for Dungeons and Dragons. I absolutely love this guy's art, knew nothing about him or his technique other than he an older stalwart of sch-fi and fantasy illustration who worked mostly in black and white. As I wrote the original post, my content continued to balloon as I discovered more and more info about Fabian, then finally had a light bulb go off on how to use his website, which is a trove of art and information. I also discovered that Fabian passed away last year at age 95!
One of Stephen Fabian's illustrations for the AD&D Ravenloft module Feast of Goblyns, by Blake Mobley, published by TSR in 1990. It was one of the few Ravenloft products I owned, bought it for the maps and art. It turns out Fabian hated doing these horror themed drawings.
Stephan Fabian's official website is here: https://fabianartgallery.azurewebsites.net/gallery. It's clunky, but has hundreds of pieces of his work. Oddly, he has only a handful from his work at TSR. He states directly on his website's TSR pieces that he retained ownership of all the art he did for TSR. Every piece of art Fabian places on his website includes his comments about the assignment. It's worth a look once you get used to the controls. Hint: use the "Back to the Gallery" button near the top of each page. The scale of his images played havoc with formatting for this post.
Cover to Fantasy Newsletter No. 24. a sci-fi fanzine. Fabian states the published added the blue tone. Published in May, 1980.
Here is something to bend the curve of the general rule (my rule?) that creativity declines with age. Fabian did not become a become a published artist until the age of 36, and was not a full time artist until the age of 44. He started doing interior art for TSR in the mid-1980s, around the age of 56 or 57. Fabian joined the U.S. Air Force right out of high school, working radios and radar, then becoming an instructor for the Air Force on those same areas. He said his love of sci-fi writing and art stemmed from his picking up smaller circulation sci-fi magazines a the air base PX.
Cover to Science Fiction Review No. 26, another sci-fi fanzine. Published July, 1978. This is classic Fabian style outside of his TSR work.
From 1952 to 1974 he worked a range of industrial jobs, finishing those careers as a foreman and engineer of aircraft instruments at Simmonds. That's a very involved job. To emphasize again, he was not a full time artist, with the bulk of his brain power going to his engineering work. He submitted his first illustration to Twilight Zine in 1966, and other magazines in the sci-fi and fantasy genres through 1971. These were mostly unpaid submissions and the publishers kept his artwork. But he was good. In 1970 and 1971 he was nominated to the Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist. After being laid off by Simmonds in 1974, Fabian went professional as an artist. He had no formal training. But he was good, with nominations to the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist from 1975 through 1981. He won a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 from the World Fantasy Convention.
From the 47-page softcover booklet Guinevere & Lancelot And Others, by Arthur Machen, published in 1986. Fabian did at least four illustrations for this booklet, including this one, which I adore. The illustration at left gives a strong sense of the melee combat scenes Fabian did. The D&D Gazetteers #6 The Dwarves of Rockhome and #13 The Shadow Elves feature several large scale battles involving orcs, dwarves, men, and elves. Fabian gives some hints on when and how he learned to paint with the caption to his painting The Cabin. He was 35, studying about color and light, learned that the color of the light in the sky need to be reflected in colors below. In one of six illustrations he did for Robert E. Howard's Queen of the Black Coast, Fabian also explains that he had to study anatomy, writing there is no way to be creative with human form, no way to depart from models or photos without understanding anatomy. He says he had a huge reference library of photos to draw from, but they were references only. He didn't copy them.
One of at least six illustration plates Fabian did for a run of the Robert E. Howard story
Queen of the Black Coast, from the Conan story cycle published by Bortner and Kruse in 1976. Fabian was clearly influenced by Frank Frazetta's work for Conan, as can be seen
here, an illustration that takes its que from Frazetta's 1971
Conan the Destroyer painting.
Fabian's style lends itself to smoothing out the human form, rounded lines, few sharp edges. He worked primarily in black ink and black or gray pencils, did some acrylic painting, which always carried less detail, and focused more on forms and composition. In many ways I can see his art falling into the field of design. While his work spans a wide range of mediums, styles, and genres, it is always distinctively Fabian. About half of his work uses pencil on coquille board to achieve his distinctive, dotted shading patterns. One of the most complex uses of this shading pattern is in the Conan illustration, above. Another interesting and complex example is below.
Illustration of The Hag, from the story collection We are all Legends by Darrel Schweitzer, published in 1981.
I became an instant fan of Fabian with the D&D Gazetteer series. He did a lot on interior work for the AD&D 2nd Edition Ravenloft setting books, to which he was well suited and which I had little interest. And Fabian wrote that he didn't have an interest in those either, only did it for the pay checks and begged to work on something else. My favorite TSR product of Fabian's bar none was the AD&D 2nd Edition Dragonlance boxed set Time of the Dragon, for which he did all of the interior illustrations. His love of the female form is on display here, oddly with three separate drawings of of mostly nude women being abducted, or maybe rescued? So that was intriguing. His drawings were so evocative of place. They do so with with style, grace, elevating the mundane, making the dangerous beautiful. Those drawings inspired my twin brother and I to make our own fantastic settings for D&D games.
And now I'll turn to some of those childhood favorites with a few pieces from the D&D Gazetteer series, followed by a few pieces from Time of the Dragon.
Fabian's take on the the Veiled Society in Gazetteer #1 The Grand Duchy of Karameikos.
This secret society was famous in the D&D adventure B6 The Veiled Society by David "Zeb" Cook. Fabian's illustrations for this first Gazetteer mirrors much of the art he did outside of TSR, using coquille board for shading.
Large interior illustration form one of the very best products TSR ever made, Gazetteer #5 The Elves of Alheim. Fabian packed Elves of Alfeim book full of work, much of it top notch. This Gazetteer made elves feel dangerous and live dangerously. Fabian's style here is what he used for majority of his TSR art - less detailed lines, smooth and rounded inks and gray pencil that capture the essence and feel of a given location, culture, or personality.
Gazetteer #13 The Republic of Darokin was a little thin on illustrations, but contains my favorite interior illustration from the whole series. Darokin is a nation of merchants, and the book brings in a merchant character class. This illustration makes that merchant character class work as a trope for an adventure game.
From Gazetteer #14
The Atruaghin Clans. This was the last in the Gazetteer series and as a publication was one of TSR worst examples of jumping the shark. The Gazetteer crammed in five North American indigenous cultures onto a tiny plateau, something like a Lost World. Take individually each Gazetteer was a masterpiece of RPG writing, art, and cartography. Taken as a comprehensive whole setting they were ridiculous. That said, Fabian packs in many wonderfully illustration to this book, and he writes that he
enjoyed the change of genre.
One of only a handful of TSR art Fabian has on his website are two illustrations from Time of the Dragon. The first is above with elves and mind flayers. This is the second., nomadic elves taking easy advantage of the local goblin tribes.
Fabian's wonderfully atmospheric and frightening illustration from the David "Zeb" Cook's 1989 Dragonlance boxed set Time of the Dragon, detailing a new continent for that setting. Here primitive mind flayers, called the Yaggol, terrorize a group of, well, primitive jungle elves.
One last Fabian illustration from Time of the Dragon, those bad ass nomadic elves again, this time either taking a captive or rescuing a captive. This image just brings on the setting of these aggressive elves with such gusto. I can feel the mountain air, the thunder of hooves. Minus the woman., this illustration actually reminds me of a scene from a Western movie, maybe Silverado. Like most of the other TSR illustrations here, I had to take this image as a screen grab from Archive.org.
Finally, a self portrait Fabian did in 1960s, his coquille board technique on full display. This is followed by an end piece he graphic he did, origin unknown, and a poem a fan wrote to him inspired by his 1974 illustration Ismet.
"Time, that insidious thief,
robs me of my precious youth,
etching his lines on my canvas
as he quickly passes.
An unappreciated masterpiece
in a gallery of modern art."
- by Kathleen Robson
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