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There is some specific Fantasy artwork (1980 or earlier era) for which I would like to find out who was the artist. The style is extremely distinctive and I remember back in the day such imagery was used on book-covers and illustrations in books and magazines.
In this particular case I don't actually have any samples to post, but I can mock up a sketch that clearly demonstrates the distinctive trademark style aspects, which should be recognizable to anyone who is familiar with this artist's work.

For other cases I can envision posting some sample pictures (I have pictures, but I don't know where they came from. Copyright status might be problematic, but that is an entirely different question.)

Would an Artist-ID question be on-topic for this site? The Faq and help-center don't give much guidance on artwork-id, but to me it is somewhat similar as story-id questions.
If it is on-topic I would like to suggest an Artist-ID tag might be useful as well.

P.S. I asked a question see here a little over 2 years ago on a somewhat similar subject which didn't get any votes to close. But it isn't exactly the same thing either. I only added the image in that question later to provide further clarification.

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Yes these are on topic and I don't see why they shouldn't be. As long as the artwork is clearly science fictional and/or fantastical it is perfectly fine to ask about.

To avoid any doubt we have had several question in the past that asked to ID an artist or artwork, for example

Looking through these most appear to use with or . I don't really see the need for a more specific tag especially considering it was decided to nuke the [author-identification] tag.

The normal guidelines when asking are in place i.e.

  • Provide information to state how it is SFF-nal
  • Provide as much extra information as possible
    • Where did you see it (artbook, cover art etc.),
    • When did you see it
    • And so on.

See the general story id guide for some more tips if you need them.

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  • I wonder why this answer got a down-vote? If you don't agree please clarify why.
    – Tonny
    Commented Aug 16, 2019 at 10:24
  • @Tonny Whoever downvoted it, appears to have downvoted the question too. Some people just don't like tag discussions which this is in part.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Commented Aug 16, 2019 at 10:31
  • I didn't even notice the downvote on the question itself. You could be right on the tag-issue. Happens a lot on SuperUser and StackOverflow as well.
    – Tonny
    Commented Aug 16, 2019 at 10:41
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    @TheLethalCarrot - This is less of a tag discussion and more of a scope discussion though. Either way, it's firmly on-topic and I look forward to seeing the question.
    – Valorum
    Commented Aug 16, 2019 at 17:29
  • @Valorum Aye I know, it does touch on tags though.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Commented Aug 16, 2019 at 17:36
  • There's also scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/32255/…; I definitely agree it's on-topic.
    – DavidW
    Commented Aug 17, 2019 at 1:38
  • @DavidW Aye there's certainly others, I just linked to a couple of examples.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Commented Aug 19, 2019 at 10:30
  • @Valorum: Between this question and The Truman Show one, I get the sense that some people just don't like finding out that thing X is on-topic. Which is a shame, because it's really easy to ignore tags.
    – Kevin
    Commented Aug 22, 2019 at 3:35

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