Fantasy Art is an art genre that depicts, most commonly, what have come to be known as fantastic creatures. These creatures are primarily dragons and unicorns but there are many many lesser known ones (take the creatures from Chief Wiggum’s tent in The Simpsons episode called Lisa’s Marriage for example.). The art basically involves anything fictional, but not in the Postmodern sense. Wizards are typically centered in Fantasy Art, as well as muscular warriors, half-naked warrior-women, elves, dwarves and pretty much anything out of a J.R.R. Tolkien style book.
It should be stated that Fantasy Art is not be confused with Anime-style art, which commonly depicts the same subjects, but is an entirely different art style.
There are many artists that are famous within the genre; most apparently small time hobbyists with a knowledge of HTML. There are a few big names, most known are Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta; the two basically created the genre in the 1960's and 1970's. The art form gained popularity as geek culture became more acceptable, at least amongst geeks. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons did about as much for the art form as either Vallejo or Frazetta, with its introduction as mass culture sometime during the 1970's. Video Games also gave Fantasy Art a tremendous amount of help. Most of the first text based games were RPGs involving knights, dragons, castles and the like.
The fan base of this art form is solid, yet not as widespread as many other art froms. The art is, in general, mostly spread via numerous websites devoted to the drawings of several artists, or even self-drawn fantasy art. It can also be purchased at numerous hobby and poster shops. Works by Vallejo and Franzetta can be purchased at their websites, http://www.borisjulie.com and http://www.frankfrazetta.com respectively. Additional works by Vallejo can be purchased at the Noble Collection website, http://www.noblecollection.com
Many thanks to MonkeyLover for help and guidence on this w/u.