His list of work includes illustrations for Dungeons & Dragons, Dragonlance, and his own comic strip series SnarfQuest.

After leaving the service, Elmore worked as an illustrator for the United States government in the Fort Knox Training Aids Department.

[1] Three years later, Elmore turned to freelance work, his art being published in National Lampoon and Heavy Metal magazines.

[1] Elmore joined the staff of TSR, Inc., the producers of Dungeons & Dragons, as its first professional illustrator,[2] in November 1981, and created art work for adventure modules, game books, and novels, as well as paintings for posters and calendars.

[3]: 16  Elmore was in charge of creating a look for the Dragonlance saga, and did many of the early sketches for the series,[1] his first cover appearing on Dragons of Autumn Twilight.

[4] British game designer Graeme Davis commented that Elmore "... should get some kind of award for drawing so many dragons and making them all different".

[3]: 332 In the late 1990s, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman used Elmore's fantasy world, Loerem, in their Sovereign Stone trilogy.

[12] In 2014, Scott Taylor of Black Gate, named Larry Elmore as #1 in a list of The Top 10 RPG Artists of the Past 40 Years, saying "Elmore not only helped define a good portion of 1980s TSR, but he also got to do the Shadowrun core cover for FASA that was so incredibly popular it reappeared on the 2nd edition and video game as well.