Jim Roslof is gone

I’m sure everyone has heard it by now. Jim Roslof, noted TSR artist(also worked forGoodman Games and others) died the other day. Roslof was an artist whose work I always enjoyed, but he wasn’t as much of an ‘iconic’ artist for me simply because Jim Roslof started working for TSR around the time that I stopped buying TSR products (which was 1982 — I think at that point Roslof had been working at TSR only a couple of years and had done things like the cover of Queen of the Demonweb Pits and a lot of illustrations inside ‘Deities and Demigods’ (both of which I had) as well as a lot of stuff for the ‘basic’ game (most of which I didn’t have since I was playing AD&D at that point)).
Everything he did that I saw, I liked. Unfortunately, I just didn’t see that much of it back in the day because I decided to try to concentrate on girls for a while instead of D&D (I soon discovered that I was a lot ‘better’ at D&D)… and by the time I came back to D&D many years later, Roslof no longer worked at TS (although neither did Gygax or anyone else whose name I probably would have recognized). I ended up getting a lot of the books that had his artwork in them by buying up second hand 1e stuff.
I did, however, have the honor of getting a few interior illustrations into Goodman Game’s DCC #28 (Into The Wilds) which was graced by a Roslof painting on the cover (see above right). So although I never met Roslof, I did at least share a publishing credit.
One of the things I really like about Roslof is that his artwork usually featured a lot of interactions between the different creatures and characters portrayed, as if each picture was telling the story of interactions (which is a nice metaphor for the way in which the game is played).