My credentials: I read my first fantasy novel when I was ten or eleven, it was The Sword of Shannara, a novel by Terry Brooks. Since then I've been hooked. I've gone through all of the greatest series by Brooks, Eddings, Jordan, Donaldson, Martin. In college I gave up fantasy for chicks and booze. This turned out to be a grave mistake. I've been back for a couple of years now and I've discovered some great new authors in my absence.
I am also a big fan of fantasy art. I once wanted to be a fantasy painter. My favorite at the time was Larry Elmore who did much of the painting in the DragonLance Series for TSR. Though a reasonable painter and artist, I always needed models to do my best work. When I saw that many of my friends, painted and drew from their imaginations, I decided to move on. It wasn't until fairly recently when I started following Tor's rerelease of the Jordan novels in eBook format that I saw that real fantasy artists use models too!
Alas. Anyway, below is an Elmore painting from the DragonLance series, Time of the Twins, by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman.
