Last year I had the pleasure of working again on one of Fantasy Flight Games‘ card games, this one based on the events of The Hobbit.
The last one I made was all centered on the Dwarves’ struggles, so I guess this work ties in nicely with the previous one.

The set is called The Battle of Lake Town (hey, they picked one of my cards for the marketing image on the website:)), one of the bits in The Hobbit most packed with action, so all the artwork obviously refers to Lake Town and its surroundings (which fellow nerds know as Esgaroth).

Both of the scenes I depicted -I’ll publish the other one in the next post – take place when – SPOILER AHEAD: IF YOU’RE ONE OF THE TWO PEOPLE ON THE PLANET WHO DOESN’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS DO NOT READ FURTHER – Smaug sets off from its lair under The Mountain and decides to kick some ass.

As everybody knows, before Bard the Bowman eventually succeeded in sticking his favourite arrow deep into Smaug’s armpit, the dragon managed to happily wreak havoc over the highly flammable, wooden built settlement on stilts.

Now, while working on this kind of assignments I normally provide a bunch of sketches to choose from.
In this case the sketching phase was quite relevant, as the choice of perspective was quite crucial.
The scene was supposed to be seen from Smaug’s eyes, so I had to convey some degree of speed and “action”.

Since architecture in perspective is quite time consuming, I made a model of the city in Sketchup first, and drew over the mockup.

Rendering the scene was quite straightforward (no fancy lighting, everything was on fire after all), and the final version was approved straight away.

I would have liked to have Smaug’s reflection on the water, or maybe its shadow on the ground, but neither the perspective nor the lighting would have justified it, so well, this is what I came up with.

I’m quite curious to see how they rendered Esgaroth in the upcoming Hobbit movie.
Illustrations set in The Hobbit aren’t as widespread as those for the Lord of The Rings, and I basically found no reference for the architectural style of the area.
But well, Tolkien Estate approved it so I guess it wasn’t too far from what the author had in mind.

Later this week I’ll post the other illustration I made for this Hobbit assignment.

by Paolo Puggioni