There’s an argument, and good discussion running through the hobby right now about box art and other elements and yet again AI. It’s a good argument to have. Most of it is aimed at the wrong target however.
The conversation keeps getting framed as traditional versus digital. Painted on canvas, good. Done on a computer, suspect. That framing is a mistake, and it does damage, because it lumps a working artist with a stylus in with a prompt typed into a machine. Those are not the same thing. They are not even close.
Two different questions are getting mashed together.
The first question: What made it?
Be it brush, airbrush, stylus, Photoshop. This tells you nothing about whether the work is any good, or whether a person made it.
A digital painter makes every mark on the screen the same way an oil painter makes every mark on the canvas. The tool is a preference, like a writer choosing a pen or a keyboard. Nobody thinks a novel written in Word is less written do they?
Of course they do not.
Art styles in the broader sense, evolved over time, techniques, tools, machinery. Look at the late great Rodger MacGowans corpus of amazing work, you can see a progression in styles, formats and approaches over time.
From duo tone block screen print [we actually did this in Art class in Oz when I was a kid], high contrast posterized in the 60’s and 70’s. GDW’s line-art, pen drawings house style and montages. Then a run of analog photo work using collages, some duotone.
By the 80’s naturalistic painting takes over the S&T, and Hobby Japan era, all brush and airbrush. S&T 81 for example.
Of the 123 covers I could find online and in my magazine archive 62 were naturalistic painting, 31 posterized photo derived, 11 line art- pen and tehn a hodge podge of blends.
Box art has always been shaped by the production tech of its moment. The 1969 posterized look wasn’t just taste, it was what cheap color printing could do. Then better presses allowed full painted art, then the camera and photo-compositing, then Photoshop, and now AI. Every generation got a new tool and most importantly every one until now was still human-authored.
Now the second question: Who made it?
Did a person decide where the light falls, how the smoke reads, what the machine looks like, where the eye goes? Or did a model average a few million images into a plausible output that nobody composed? That is the real question to be asking. That is, I feel the only question.
So, the line of quesitoning isn’t traditional versus digital. It’s authored versus generated.
AI is the break in the evolution in our corner of the art world because it outsources authorship, not because it’s merely newer.
You can usually see the difference. Generated images fall apart under a second look. The hardware melts, panel lines wander, a vehicle won’t hold its own shape. Light comes from three directions at once.
Perspective breaks where two objects meet. Insignia turn to nonsense, hands grow fingers, or my favorite two dudes holding the same gun..sigh. None of it is composed, it lacks depth, realism, and real-world accuracy because nothing chose to position the light, draw a real Leopard, or J-35 or grenade. An authored image survives the second look, because a person was accountable for every single part of it.
Wargaming has always run on that accountability. Our covers were painted by people who knew the subject, who got the tank right because they cared that it was right. That lineage runs from the artists who defined the look of the hobby straight through to the people painting covers today, on canvas or on a tablet.
Here is a standard worth consdiering. Credit the artist. Ask who made it, not what they made it with. Don’t hand the anti-AI case a framing that throws real artists under the bus next to the slop. If we start treating “digital” as a synonym for “fake,” we lose the working painters we should be protecting, and the machines win the argument by accident.
Authored, not generated. That’s the whole of it, put as plainly as I can.
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This discussion is just getting going. I’ll be tracking how it plays out across the hobby in WARNO, my weekly wargaming roundup. Subscribe if you want to follow along.
Absolutely agree. I can tell AI-generated “art” instantly and I predict it will eventually raise the value of verified human art – because everyone hates the AI slop. This having been said, ChatGPT has been an absolute revelation when it comes to learning a new wargame. It’s as if it was designed for this exact purpose. I uploaded the pdf rulebook and PACs for Great Battles of Alexander (a solid 4.2+ weight game) and now I’m able to instantly get rules clarifications and even generated examples of play (!). Me and my 13 year old learned the game much more quickly than what would otherwise have been the case. And it is invaluable during those early turns where your grasp of exceptions and procedures is still shaky. It will even go out to the forums for clarifications and it’s smart enough to lend greater weight to statements made by the game designers (and yes it knows who they are). Hell, it even sifted through 25+ years of forum posts over on consimworld to find the underlying thought process behind several of the rules. So, while AI is an unwelcome development on many issues, it is probably the single biggest advancement I’ve seen in my 59 years when I comes to actually playing wargames. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but it’s absolutely true. Btw, I am using the $20/month Pro tier of ChatGPT.
Agreed, and well put. My whole take fits on a bumper sticker: know who the author is and what tools they used. Disclosure over everything.
I don’t discount digital art per se. But a man of Peter’s expertise, decades of hand and eye, rightly commands a premium for exactly that.
And you’ve nailed the half people miss the moment they hear “AI.” Using it to learn a 4.2 beast like Alexander, feeding it the rules and PACs, having it weight the designers’ own words and dig through 25 years of ConsimWorld for the why behind a rule, that isn’t slop. That’s a human using a tool to play better. I wrote a whole piece on exactly this, it’s the flip side of the box-art fight: the machine scouts and teaches, you keep the judgment and play the game.
Learning it next to your 13-year-old is the best part. That’s the hobby winning.
My hand made this.
Forty plus years of practice made this.
I’ve been painting military subjects professionally, full time, for the past eleven years, after retiring from a three decade military career, not to mention a lifelong wargamer. I have direct experience with many of my subjects, which I hopefully transmit via the attention to detail I put into every painting.
This is essentially an apples and oranges thing only in this case, I feel some apples are disguising themselves as oranges or vice versa.
If one goes to buy apples and expects to get apples but discover they are actually oranges or one goes to buy apples knowingly in the guise of oranges and doesn’t mind or even prefers such.
Apologies for the bad analogy…I’m a painter not a writer, but I hope you get my point.
There’s a world of difference in honing a skill with an especially demanding medium, such as old school paint on canvas with a brush, for the over thirty years it takes to put in the magic 10,000 hours, other than three hundred hours of skill on a computer program, far less with A.I.
Which do you think deserves more value?
In the context of a boardgame box cover, if I know the company has taken the time to engage a professional, and they’ve done their job professionally, I know they are themselves also. It’s just basic marketing really.
Which do you want to represent your product?
Back in the day, I was far more attracted to the-‘Battle of the Bulge’, hand painted imagery, rather than that horrific, cut and paste, montage on ‘The Russian Campaign’, pictured in the article. Which do you think has more eye catching, thematic appeal?
If it’s cheap and easy, that’s what I expect in the contents somewhere.
Choose wisely.
In the end, we live in an epoch of time where it not only depends what you are looking for, but knowing what you are actually looking at!
So your arguement is that unless its a hand brushed image even digital drawing is not acceptable?
thank you for this. It means something when the person who actually made the thing walks into the conversation, and doubly so from someone with your years behind the brush and your years in uniform. That combination is exactly why the detail rings true.
You also settled something I’d been going back and forth on. From a photo I couldn’t tell if Rising Dragons was paint or a very good digital hand. Now I know. Paint, canvas, brush, forty years. I’ll say so plainly.
Your marketing point is the sharpest thing in this whole exchange, and I wish I’d put it in the piece myself: a company that pays for a professional is telling you what it thinks of its own product. The cover is the first thing it says about the contents, and cheap-and-easy up front usually means cheap-and-easy inside. I’m going to borrow that, with credit to you.
On value, I’m right there with you. Thirty years and ten thousand hours in a punishing medium is the summit. It should carry the highest price and the most respect. No argument from me.
The only line I’d hold is a narrow one. My fight in the piece was with work no human authored at all, the generated stuff. I didn’t want honest painters who happen to work digitally swept into the same bin as the slop, because that’s a different thing, or no sin at all. You and I are aimed at the same target: the cheap, the fake, and the undisclosed. Know what you’re looking at.