Keith Parkinson Art Interview

Warcry was able to track down Nick Parkinson, son of fantasy artist Keith Parkinson, for a quick Q&A about his late father’s involvement with Dungeons & Dragons, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, and more.

Q: How about his early career and path to Vanguard. Can you talk about what he did, how he got started and caught his first break?

A: He technically got his start at a company in Chicago called Advertising Posters, who had nothing to do with either advertising or posters but instead created the artwork for backings of pinball machines and some of the earliest arcade games.

His big break came though when he was hired by TSR (creators of Dungeons & Dragons) in the early 1980s. He, along with Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley and Clyde Caldwell created nearly all of the art for Dungeons & Dragons and its related (Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, etc) products during the D&D heydays of the 1980s.

After leaving TSR to do freelance work, he moved on to doing primarily book covers. His works have appeared on the covers of books by Terry Goodkind (with whom he was good friends), David Eddings, Terry Brooks, Anne McCaffrey and Orson Scott Card to name a few.

Then, as video games – particularly PC games, started to become big, he started working more and more in that area, which ultimately led to him doing the EverQuest covers and the rest is history.