Jeff Easley

Jeff Easley (Nicholasville, Kentucky, born 1954) is an American oil painter best known for fantasy artwork for role-playing games, comics and magazines, though he also produced commercial art without a fantasy theme. His name is tied to the years when TSR published Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, whose covers he shaped through the 1980s and 1990s.

As a child he drew ghosts and monsters, inspired by horror movies and model kits. He studied painting at Murray State University in Kentucky. After graduate school he moved to Massachusetts, where he began working as a professional artist, first on commissions for Warren Publications and Marvel Comics magazines, while most of his income came from a job outside art. He names Frank Frazetta as a major influence.

In 1982 he joined TSR through his friend, the fellow Kentucky artist Larry Elmore. His first task was painting gemstones on the spines of the early Endless Quest books. He went on to paint many covers for the first and second edition AD&D hardcover rulebooks, including the Monster Manual, Unearthed Arcana and the Player's Handbook, as well as modules, supplements and Dragonlance covers. One of his images, "Red Dragon", appeared on the Monster Manual cover from 1983 to 1989. After TSR was acquired by Wizards of the Coast, he illustrated forty-nine cards for Magic: The Gathering, from Mercadian Masques through Eventide.

His legacy lies in the vast number of role-playing game pages he illustrated. In 2014, Scott Taylor of Black Gate ranked him fifth in a list of the top ten RPG artists of the past forty years, noting that no other artist had filled more RPG pages with art than he had.