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.
https://bigboard.substack.com/s/warno-weekly-news-and-views-regarding
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.