Larry Elmore had a girl, once, long ago before he moved out of the TSR pit and became a freelance artist. She was lovely, with small pouting lips, pointed chin, and eyes that would look right through you to the horizon. She was replaced by models, hundreds of them that have entered his work over the past thirty years, but this inorganic girl, the one from pure imagination in the early 1980s is still my favorite. She was Larry's muse, or at least I'll argue that, because you find her in all his ladies of that era. I miss her...
Seeing an ad of the Star Frontier from a comic book, the first photo you featured, made me fall in love with his artwork. Since then, I was searching for that “girl” on all of the TSR game modules. I haven’t played the table top rpg at the time but it was only years after, in college, that I came across the red handbooks with his brilliant work. I never though his line work would be amazing as well. It was inspiring at the time and it still is even until now.
Well, to be fair, Larry did change the look of his ladies after leaving TSR when he started using live models exclusively, but that lost the ‘fantasy’ for me. I don’t like too much reality in my fantasy, ala Fred Fields, so Larry having an ‘it girl’, never bothered me but instead added to the unreality of the games.
On one hand, Elmore’s art is iconic to 2nd Edition AD&D and brings back many, many wonderful memories.
On the other hand, I was always a bit annoyed that all of his women looked basically the same and I wished he had crafted his artistic skills to create a more varied look for the women appearing in his art. This is where artists like Parkinson and Beauvais excelled in style over Elmore.