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I'm fascinated that they apparently took photos of actual human models in costume and based the cover art on that. I would understand using models if it were for animation in order to get motion capture, but you'd think for static pictures like cover art you wouldn't need to go to so much bother.

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My understanding is it is one of those things that is more commonly used than you would think. https://www.michaelwhelan.com/faq/ has a section where he covers using models and images. I was trying to find links to some of the "making of" pages he has, as they sometimes have models showing poses.

Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell also use this technique, making some of the most amazing paintings because they're grounded in real anatomy and references, instead "this looks about right". The artist not using photographic references can miss important details or make proportion mistakes while being deep in the act of creation but those flaws are easily visible to observers after the fact. We saw this on box art of the 80s a lot. Take a look at the dude on the original mega man box, for instance. Who stands like that?!

The quality of an illustration is almost always a reflection of the quality of the reference the artist gathered.

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