Darlene (artist)

Darlene (born Darlene Jean Pekul in 1954) is an American artist and calligrapher whose artwork appeared in early Dungeons & Dragons works published by TSR. Her best-known piece, the full-color map of the Flanaess that accompanied the 1980 folio edition of the World of Greyhawk by Gary Gygax, was used as the basis of all subsequent Greyhawk publications and maps until Greyhawk publications were discontinued by Wizards of the Coast in 2008.

Darlene was born in Wisconsin. The third of seven children, she grew up on a farm near Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Her mother was an artist, and Darlene followed in her footsteps, becoming a member of the Geneva Lake Arts Association at a young age. She made her first professional gallery sale before the age of 16. After graduating from Elkhorn High School in 1972, she enrolled at Beloit College and majored in art. In 1975, as part of her studies, she spent a term in London, England, where she also studied calligraphy. She graduated cum laude in 1976 with a B.A. in Studio Art, and moved to Lake Geneva, where she eked out a living as a graphic artist by holding down three part-time jobs simultaneously. In 1979, she helped co-found The Wisconsin Calligrapher's Guild and served as the first editor of its newsletter.

In 1977, Mike Carr, one of the first employees of TSR, met Darlene, when he went to a local graphics shop to order brochures for Gen Con. He and Darlene started dating, and Carr used his influence at TSR to get her some freelance art assignments. One of her first assignments was to design and produce an outdoor sign for TSR's building in Lake Geneva. She made the sign in the shape of a medieval shield and painted a dragon on one side and the TSR logo on the reverse.

In 1979 and 1980, she received many freelance art and calligraphy assignments, including artwork for:

In 1980, she was given the opportunity to create the piece of art for which she is best known, the full-colour map of the Flanaess that accompanied Gary Gygax's folio edition of the World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting. Gygax was busy transforming his home D&D campaign called "Greyhawk" into a publishable form. His long-range plan - left incomplete when he was ousted from TSR in 1985 - was to create an entire fantasy world; however when he asked TSR's printing house about the maximum size of paper they could handle, the answer was just 34 in × 22 in (86 cm × 56 cm). He found that, using the scale he desired, he could only fit the northeast corner of one continent on two of those sheets. He placed the city and castle of Greyhawk roughly in the centre of the map, in an area that would have about the same temperate climate as his home in Lake Geneva, and made a rough sketch of the rest of the map, an area he called the "Flanaess". Darlene was given the assignment of developing a full color map on a hex grid from Gygax's prototype map.

Shortly before World of Greyhawk was published, Darlene created the cover art for Dragon magazine issue 37. This issue also carried the first episode of "Jasmine", her color comic strip about a princess whose realm was coveted by an evil prince. The strip ran for 12 issues before being cancelled for not appealing to the magazine's mostly male readers. Darlene tried to a promote a petition at Origins '81 to have the comic strip brought back, but it gathered few signatures. Shortly after this, she designed and produced the card game Jasmine: The Battle for the Mid-Realm. Although reviews in Gameplay and The Dragon were good - Merle Rasmussen wrote, "Jasmine incorporates a few old ideas with many new ones to create a fresh approach in card gaming." - an expected expansion deck never materialized.

Darlene continued to take assignments from TSR, and between 1981 and 1984, her work appeared in White Plume Mountain, Investigation of Hydell, Monster Cards Set 3, the boxed set of the updated and expanded World of Greyhawk Fantasy Setting, and Legends & Lore.

Darlene drew the cover art for the KABAL role-playing game (1982).