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==Freelance fantasy artist== | ==Freelance fantasy artist== | ||
In 1977, [[Mike Carr | In 1977, [[Mike Carr|Mike Carr]], one of the first employees of TSR, met {{smallcaps|Darlene}}, when he went to a local graphics shop to order brochures for GenCon. He and {{smallcaps|Darlene}} started dating, and Carr used his influence at TSR to get her some freelance art assignments. One of her first assignments was to design and produce an outdoor sign for TSR's building in Lake Geneva. She made the sign in the shape of a medieval shield and painted a dragon on one side and the TSR logo on the reverse.<ref>{{smallcaps|Darlene}}: “Among the first jobs I was given to do was to design and produce an outdoor sign for TSR's Williams Street building. I made the sign in the shape of a shield and painted The Dragon on one side and TSR on the other.” {{cite web| title = Campaigns: Greyhawk: Darlene Pekul | work = The Piazza: Old D&D Campaign Worlds | publisher = PHPBB | date = 2012-09-29 | url = http://www.thepiazza.org.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=9309&#p115114| accessdate = 2013-05-29}}</ref> | ||
In 1979 and 1980, she received many freelance art and calligraphy assignments, including artwork for: | In 1979 and 1980, she received many freelance art and calligraphy assignments, including artwork for: | ||
| Line 53: | Line 53: | ||
== External links == | == External links == | ||
{{External link disclaimer}} | {{External link disclaimer}} | ||
* [http://darlenetheartist.com/ Darlene the Artist]—the creator's website | |||
* {{cite web|url=http://www.pen-paper.net/rpgdb.php?op=showcreator&creatorid=970 |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20100823211040/http://www.pen-paper.net/rpgdb.php?op=showcreator&creatorid=970 |archivedate=August 23, 2010|title=Darlene Pekul at Pen & Paper}} | * {{cite web|url=http://www.pen-paper.net/rpgdb.php?op=showcreator&creatorid=970 |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20100823211040/http://www.pen-paper.net/rpgdb.php?op=showcreator&creatorid=970 |archivedate=August 23, 2010|title=Darlene Pekul at Pen & Paper}} | ||
* [http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/06/interview-darlene.html | * [http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/06/interview-darlene.html Interview:Darlene]—interview by James Maliszewski on Grognardia (blog). | ||
== References == | == References == | ||
Latest revision as of 09:28, 14 November 2024
| Darlene | |
|---|---|
 Darlene at her booth promoting her artwork while at a convention. Photo by GramdDM on Twitter. | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Born: | 1 August 1954[1], Wisconsin, USA |
| First Greyhawk work: | Darlene map |
| Alias: | Darlene Jean Pekul |
Darlene (born Darlene Jean Pekul, 1954) is an American artist and calligrapher whose artwork appeared in early Dungeons & Dragons works published by TSR. Her best-known piece, the full-colour map of the Flanaess known as the Darlene map, which accompanied the 1980 folio edition of the World of Greyhawk by Gary Gygax, was used as the basis of all subsequent Greyhawk publications.
Early life
Darlene, the third of seven children,[2] grew up on a farm near Elkhorn, Wisconsin.[3] Her mother was an artist,[4] and DARLENE followed in her footsteps, becoming a member of the Geneva Lake Arts Association at a young age.[2] She made her first professional gallery sale before the age of 16.[4] After graduating from Elkhorn High School in 1972, she enrolled at Beloit College and majored in art.[4] In 1975, as part of her studies, she spent a term in London, England, where she also studied calligraphy.[2] She graduated cum laude in 1976 with a B.A. in Studio Art,[2] and moved to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where she eked out a living as a graphic artist by holding down three part-time jobs simultaneously. In 1979, she helped co-found The Wisconsin Calligrapher’s Guild and served as the first editor of its newsletter.[2]
Freelance fantasy artist
In 1977, Mike Carr, one of the first employees of TSR, met Darlene, when he went to a local graphics shop to order brochures for GenCon. He and Darlene started dating, and Carr used his influence at TSR to get her some freelance art assignments. One of her first assignments was to design and produce an outdoor sign for TSR's building in Lake Geneva. She made the sign in the shape of a medieval shield and painted a dragon on one side and the TSR logo on the reverse.[5]
In 1979 and 1980, she received many freelance art and calligraphy assignments, including artwork for:
- Dungeon Master's Guide
- Deities & Demigods
- an accessory book called The Rogues Gallery.
- cover art for the adventure In Search of the Unknown[6]:134[7]
Map of the Flanaess
In 1980, she was given the opportunity to create the piece of art for which she is best known, the full-colour map of the Flanaess known as the Darlene map, which accompanied Gary Gygax’s folio edition of the World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting.[8] Gygax was busy transforming his home D&D campaign called "Greyhawk” into a publishable form. His long-range plan–left incomplete when he was ousted from TSR in 1985–was to create an entire fantasy world; however, when he asked TSR's printing house about the maximum size of paper they could handle, the answer was just 34" x 22" (86 cm x 56 cm). He found that, using the scale he desired, he could only fit the northeast corner of one continent on two of those sheets.[9][10] He placed the city and castle of Greyhawk roughly in the centre of the map, in an area that would have about the same temperate climate as his home in Lake Geneva, and made a rough sketch of the rest of the map, an area he called “the Flanaess”. DARLENE was given the assignment of developing a full color map on a hex grid from Gygax's prototype map.[11]
Jasmine
Shortly before World of Greyhawk was published, Darlene created the cover art for Dragon magazine issue 37.[12] This issue also carried the first episode of “Jasmine”, her color comic strip about a princess whose realm was coveted by an evil prince. The strip ran for 12 issues before being cancelled for not appealing to the magazine's mostly male readers. DARLENE tried to promote a petition at Origins '81 to have the comic strip brought back, but it gathered few signatures.[13] Shortly after this, she designed and produced the card game Jasmine: The Battle for the Mid-Realm. Although reviews in Gameplay[14] and The Dragon were good— Merle Rasmussen wrote “Jasmine incorporates a few old ideas with many new ones to create a fresh approach in card gaming”[15]—an expected expansion deck never materialized.
Further freelance assignments
She continued to take assignments from TSR, and between 1981 and 1984, her work appeared in White Plume Mountain, Investigation of Hydell, Monster Cards Set 3,[6]:106 the boxed set of the updated and expanded World of Greyhawk Fantasy Setting, and Legends & Lore.
Darlene drew the cover art for the KABAL role-playing game (1982).[6]:188
Post-fantasy career
In 1984, she legally changed her name to just Darlene, dropping her surname Pekul as well as legally changing the typography of her name to a capital and small capitals.[2] That same year, she left the world of fantasy artwork to enroll in Graphic Design at Indiana University, and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 1987. After graduation, she and her first husband, Michael Price, moved to Plainville, Connecticut, where she was a freelance graphic artist and taught calligraphy and art classes. She developed an interest in Native American spirituality and art, and later an interest in Egyptian art.[2]
She briefly returned to the fantasy art world in 2003, when she was approached by Gary Gygax to again create maps for a project of his. When Gygax had been ousted from TSR in 1985, he had lost creative rights to all of his published Greyhawk material. However, he still had all of his own notes from his Greyhawk home campaign, and decided to publish details of the original castle and city in six volumes.[16] Since Wizards of the Coast (WotC) still owned the rights to the name Greyhawk, Gygax changed the name of the castle to Castle Zagyg—the reverse homophone of his own name. Gygax also changed the name of the nearby city to "Yggsburgh", a play on his initials E.G.G. In 2005, Troll Lord Games published Volume I, Castle Zagyg: Yggsburgh. This 256-page hardcover book contained details of Gygax's original city, its personalities, and politics, as well as a two-part fold out map of the area rendered by DARLENE.
Personal life
After the end of her first marriage, Darlene began a relationship with occult author Vincent Bridges, and for many years they lived in Mount Gilead, North Carolina.[2] Together they founded Aethyrea Books and published several books about the occult.
After over twenty years in Mount Gilead, Bridges moved to Prague so that he could produce a play, "The Donkey and the Cradle", in a historic residence of occultist Edward Kelley, but he died on July 25, 2014, the very day the play was to premiere.[17]
Legacy
The map DARLENE created for the original World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting (1980) continued to be the basis of all future Greyhawk maps, adventures, and campaigns created by both TSR and WotC for decades following, all the way to contemporary material such as the massively popular shared-world Living Greyhawk campaign (2000–2008) and the Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign (2019).
External links
Disclaimer:Any lore presented through the following links does not necessarily adhere to established officially published content, and the views expressed do not necessarily represent the views of the editors of this wiki.
- Darlene the Artist—the creator's website
- Darlene Pekul at Pen & Paper. Archived from the original on August 23, 2010.
- Interview:Darlene—interview by James Maliszewski on Grognardia (blog).
References
Notes
Citations
- ↑ Darlene. Save Queen Anne!. GoFundMe.com, 1 August 2022. Retrieved on 28 October 2022. "Today is my Birthday. I'm three-score and eight years old."
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Pekul, Darlene. RPG Biographical Data. Darlene the Artist. Archived from the original on July 20, 2012. Retrieved on 2013-05-29.
- ↑ Darlene the Artist » About DARLENE. web.archive.org , 2012-07-20.
- ↑ a b c Pekul, Darlene. About Darlene. Darlene the Artist. Archived from the original on 2012-07-20.
- ↑ Darlene: “Among the first jobs I was given to do was to design and produce an outdoor sign for TSR's Williams Street building. I made the sign in the shape of a shield and painted The Dragon on one side and TSR on the other.” Campaigns: Greyhawk: Darlene Pekul. The Piazza: Old D&D Campaign Worlds. PHPBB , 2012-09-29. Retrieved on 2013-05-29.
- ↑ a b c Schick, Lawrence (1991) Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to Role-Playing Games, Prometheus Books ISBN: 0-87975-653-5.
- ↑ Darlene Pekul. The Rogues Gallery: A Who’s Who of AD&D. Tome of Treasures. Retrieved on 2013-05-29.
- ↑ Garfield, Simon (2012) On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does, Profile Books ISBN: 978-1-8476-5855-5.
- ↑ Gygax: "When I was asked to create a campaign setting for TSR to market, I did a new and compact "world"—that only in part, of course, as that was all I could fit onto the two maps allowed. So that became the World of Greyhawk." Gary Gygax: Q & A (Part I, Page 8). EN World , 2002-09-06. Retrieved on 2009-03-15.
- ↑ Gygax: "I found out the maximum map size TSR could produce, got the go-ahead for two maps of that size, then sat down for a couple of weeks and hand-drew the whole thing. After the maps were done and the features shown were named, I wrote up brief information of the features and states. Much of the information was drawn from my own personal world, but altered to fit the new one depicted on the maps."Gary Gygax: Q & A (Part IV, Page 11). EN World , 2003-11-05. Retrieved on 2009-03-15.
- ↑ Interview: Darlene. Grognardia. Retrieved on 2009-06-23.
- ↑ The Acaeum: Dragon 37.
- ↑ Darlene Pekul. Everything2 , 2005-02-16. Retrieved on 2013-05-29.
- ↑ Lentz, Patricia (June 1983). "Cards and a Good Deal More". Gameplay: 60–61. Baltimore, MD: Avalon-Hill.
- ↑ Rasmussen, Merle (January 1983). "Fun Is In The Cards With JASMINE". Dragon. Lake Geneva, WI: TSR Periodicals.
- ↑ Gygax: "I have laid out a new schematic of castle and dungeon levels based on both my original design of 13 levels plus side adjuncts, and the 'New Greyhawk Castle' that resulted when Rob and I combined our efforts and added a lot of new levels too. From that Rob will draft the level plans for the newest version of the work. Meantime, I am collecting all the most salient features, encounters, tricks, traps, etc. for inclusion on the various levels. So, the end result will be what is essentially the best of our old work in a coherent presentation usable by all DMs, the material having all the known and yet to be discussed features of the original work that are outstanding... I hope."Gary Gygax: Q & A (Part IX, page 81). EN World , 2005-12-15. Retrieved on 2009-03-15.
- ↑ (2014-09-20). "Vincent Bridges". Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition 27. J. S. Kupperman. Retrieved on 2015-08-23.
Bibliography
| This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors). |
Encyclopedia Greyhawkania Index
The Encyclopedia Greyhawkania Index (EGI) is based on previous work of Jason Zavoda through '08, continued by numerous other fans. The EGI article has a list of sources, product names, abbreviations, and a link to the full, downloadable index.
| Topic | Type | Description | Product | Page/Card/Image |
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