Hi, City Editor Declan here.
Growing up, my friends and I frequently played, “Dungeons & Dragons.” It was like our own version of the Hellfire Club from “Stranger Things” — just without Eddie Munson’s shaggy mullet.
Little did we know, some of the artwork that inspired our fantasy adventures was created by a Kentuckian — Larry Elmore.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Elmore’s oil paintings graced the covers of “Dungeons & Dragons” books + many fantasy and science fiction novels. Perhaps his most famous piece, simply titled “Basic D&D The Red Dragon” was used as the cover for the 1983 edition of the game — the same set my friends and I played with as kids. It’s so well known that it’s been reused and parodied many times over the years.
I recently visited Elmore’s home studio to talk about growing up in Louisville + rural Kentucky, how tales of its dark forests and deep hills shaped him as a storyteller, and why he finds himself always turning to the landscape of Kentucky when he imagines fantastical worlds.
“It’s more than home”
Larry Elmore was born Aug. 5, 1948 in Louisville, though he grew up near Clarkson, KY — that’s ~70 miles south of Derby City in Grayson County. It was here that Elmore’s love of storytelling began.
“People back then told stories,” said Elmore, remembering nights when his mother would read to him by kerosene lamplight. “There was no TV, no electricity.” For a young Larry Elmore the world was still mysterious. “People still believed in ghosts and spirits. You could be walking in the woods and meet the old devil, Satan himself.”
Elmore described many nights when neighbors and relatives would gather around a wood stove or fireplace and swap stories. It began with talk of work or hunting + fishing exploits, but eventually the young Elmore would pipe up.
“Tell me a scary story,” he would say.
During our conversation, Elmore kept returning to these early days as the source of his inspiration and formation as an artist. “It was about the land. It was great stories that just fed my imagination.”
Elmore’s family moved to Louisville briefly when he was in second grade. He attended Hazelwood Elementary School — he recalled a school trip when all the kids crowded the bus radio to cheer on Muhammad Ali in one of his earliest bouts — while his mother worked as a waitress at the Brown Hotel and his father learned bookkeeping.
They returned to the Clarkson area shortly after, where Elmore graduated high school and met his wife, Betty.
He attended Western Kentucky University with the intention of becoming an art teacher, but his instructors pushed him to become a full-time artist and attend graduate school in New York. But when Elmore graduated college in 1971, he was immediately drafted into the army.
“I was always a little guy,” he said, remembering his army weigh-in at 103 pounds. “They said ‘you’ll make a good tunnel rat.’ I thought I was dead.”
Elmore was deployed to Germany in the early 1970s, where he served as a combat engineer. When he returned to the US, he worked at Fort Knox illustrating combat manuals.
“I knew every tank, every helicopter, every machine, I could rotate them in my mind and draw them from memory,” Elmore said.
It was at Fort Knox that Elmore first learned about “Dungeons & Dragons” — aka “D&D.” A coworker introduced the game to the fort, where they’d play over their 30-minute lunch breaks. When someone suggested he submit illustrations to TSR, Inc. — the “D&D” publisher — he went for it.
It wasn’t long before the publisher offered Elmore a job. Elmore’s family, though, had just bought a house. There were kids in school, and Larry had a well-paying civil service job at Fort Knox. The prospect of uprooting their life and moving to Lake Geneva, WI, TSR’s headquarters, was daunting.
“I was happy. I turned them down, twice,” Elmore said, but TSR wouldn’t take no for an answer, offering to double Elmore’s current salary and hire his wife Betty in a secretarial and typesetting job at double her current salary as well. The decision was made.
Elmore spoke positively of his time in Lake Geneva. Another Kentucky artist, Jeff Easley, was hired at the same time. Elmore described rubber band fights between artists, meetings with the game’s creator Gary Gygax, and interactions with some of his favorite artists of the time.
But even then, he brought a little bit of his old Kentucky home with him. In one of his pieces, “Eyes of Autumn,” Elmore positions a haunted-looking scarecrow and a witch against a rural Kentucky landscape. “I made those hills a little taller,” he said, but the location is right here in the Bluegrass state. It was so recognizably local that a neighbor later told him he knew which barn was used for reference.
“It’s more than home,” he told me.
During our visit, Elmore showed me around his house, where large originals hang above the couch, in the living room, and behind the headboards of his guest rooms. Scattered among the paintings used for “D&D” + novel covers are portraits of his family.
His style is so uniform that one melds seamlessly with the other. It’s easy to imagine his family portraits becoming his fantasy paintings — all you’d have to do is replace the kids with elves or dwarves. “The tire tracks could be cart ruts,” Elmore added.
The little tumblebug
After he left TSR, Larry Elmore returned to Kentucky. He and his wife bought land just a few miles from where his grandparents grew up near Clarkson. He continued working freelance for decades, illustrating book covers and trading cards, but a series of health problems forced him take pause.
“I’ve slowed down. Life has been good. Things have turned out more than I thought they would,” he said. Elmore returned to this gratitude repeatedly in our discussion. He told me he doesn’t consider himself famous. “I feel like a little tumblebug,” he said, “just pushing forward.”
Larry Elmore may be slowing down, but he’s far from finished with his work. He’s in the process of touching up and selling many of his original pieces, and he and his wife run a small print shop out of the studio. Most of his work is available online as prints — and he signs every one.
