Game of Thrones – Aegon Targaryen

As I promised last time, here’s my depiction of young Aegon Targaryen for Game of Thrones latest Chapter Pack, The Shadow City, by Fantasy Flight Games.

Now, I was about to write “hey, this is the second time I draw Aegon, the first being this one in the book World of Ice and Fire”.

Luckily I did double check before writing that, and as it turn out I was being wrong.
I mean, wrong all along, even when I was working at this illustration.

First, the Targaryen I drew back then was Aerys the Mad. Of course I knew it at the time, the names just got mixed up in my mind after so long.

That left me with the question “bloody hell, who is this guy I just drew?”

The only Aegon I remembered was the son of Rhaegar and Lyanna Stark, whose head was smashed in by The Mountain when he was just a baby.
That clearly couldn’t be it.

Intrigued, I went as far as looking for a family tree of the Targaryen family.
As pretty as it is, that left me with even more questions, as there’s a whole bunch of Aegons in that family tree, and none of them rang any bell.

I eventually looked up his entry on Wiki of Ice and Fire (yes, I should have done that first thing), and that left me flabbergasted, as I had NO MEMORY WHATSOEVER of all this after reading all the books. Twice.

Once aboard the Shy Maid, Tyrion is introduced to Griff’s son, “Young Griff”, a young man who dyes his hair blue in memory of his late mother, who was from Tyrosh. He is a lithe and well-made youth, with a lanky build already as tall as Griff. Tyrion notes that the boy’s eyes seem to be dark blue, but look black by lamplight, and purple in the light of dusk. He has long eyelashes. […]

[…] After being rescued from the Sorrows, Tyrion admits his suspicion that the youth is claiming to be an incognito Aegon. The young man explains his apparent survival to Tyrion while they play cyvasse. According to his account, the infant killed during the Sack of King’s Landing was a tanner’s infant son born at Pisswater Bend, a street of King’s Landing. The child’s mother had died at birth. The tanner sold his boy to Varys for a jug of wine, since he already had other sons, but had never tasted Arbor gold. Varys arranged the swap between the two infants. Elia received the tanner’s son, whom Tyrion dubs the pisswater prince, while Varys took custody of the real Prince Aegon.

So, moral of the story is that if you have a memory as shitty as mine, the world looks new every time you open your eyes in the morning.

Also, I can save in books by keeping just a dozen at home, and then periodically going “aw, I’ve never read this, cool”.

by Paolo Puggioni

Game of Thrones – Peace and Prosperity

The illustration below belongs to the bunch I made for the Game of Thrones expansion Sands of Dorne, by Fantasy Flight Games.

I actually received the box set quite a while ago, but I got distracted by something shiny and I forgot to brag about it.

Look how pretty it is:

I LOVE everything about the fact that illustrators get to receive an actual physical thing to put on a shelf and look at.
I like the smell of the new cards when you open them, I like too browse the other illustrators’ work, I even like the postman going “something from the States for you”.
You kind of loose that working in video games, with Playstation online store and all that.

Anyway, Sands of Dorne has been sitting on my shelf for a couple of months now, so it’s about time I share the illustrations in it.

The one below is called Peace and Prosperity, and it depicts one of the gates of King’s Landing, during on of those brief hiatus when people weren’t killing each other.

It’s a bit of a bummer that the final version of the card cropped a lot from the original, but hey, it happens.

For the guy in the foreground I took as a reference an old master’s painting, if I remember correctly.
Unfortunately that’s as far as my memory goes, so in lieu of more details about it I can only offer the original sketch.

As part of the feedback, I had to move things around and rearrange various elements, so the coloured version differs from the sketch a little bit.

Interestingly, I wasn’t really sure about what kind of crest the banners at the gate of King’s Landing would display at this point of the story.

This is when Geoffrey was king, and I didn’t know whether the flags of the city would fly the Lannisters’ flags or those of the Baratheons.

The art director was very happy to start a discussion about it, and as it turns out, at that time they would use a hybrid banner with the crests of both houses.
The more you know..

Anyway, more Sands of Dorne illustrations next week.
Oh, as usual, made with Krita.

By Paolo Puggioni

Ser Justin Massey

This is one of the (many) illustration I had the pleasure to make for the Game of Thrones game over the past year or so.

It’s part of The March on Winterfell by Fantasy Flight Games, and although the expansion isn’t out yet, the image is already displayed on the product’s page, so here it is in all its slightly higher res glory.

For those who – like me – don’t remember Ser Justin Massey neither from the tv series or the Game of Thrones books, here’s all I know about him, diligently pasted from his entry on the Wiki of Ice and Fire:

Justin is a large man with pink cheeks, blue eyes, and a mop of white blonde hair pale as flax. The fair knight has a neatly-trimmed blond beard. His tunic displays the triple spiral of House Massey.

Justin, who has a pleasing manner and a ready smile, often tells jokes with a glib tongue.
Stannis Baratheon refers to Justin as “the smiler” and Clayton Suggs considers him a “prancing fool”.

I might have made him slightly fitter than it was supposed to be judging by his description, but the art director was happy about him, so that’s how he officially looks like now.

And since I’m a good boy, I didn’t get rid of the sketch this time.

There are still a couple of illustration that I’ll be allowed to post before these Game of Thrones expansions are released, which I’ll do over the next few days.

by Paolo Puggioni

Game of Thrones – Valar Dohaeris

As I said in my last post, The Archmaester’s Key, Game of Thrones last chapter pack by Fantasy Flight Games, has recently been released on FFG’s store, and I had the pleasure of illustrating Valar Dohaeris, one of the cards of this expansion.

As the name suggests (if you are a Game of Thrones’ nerd as I am), the illustration is set in Braavos, and it depicts the Temple of The House of Black and White, which is where Arya Stark spends a considerable amount of time both in the books and in the HBO’s series.

I have to say, the chapters about Arya were among my favourites while reading the series, so working on this was even more enjoyable to me.

In case anyone’s memories were fuzzy about this place, I happen to have the relevant bits handy, straight from my brief:)

Slowly her eyes adjusted. The temple seemed much larger within than it had without. The septs of Westeros were seven-sided, with seven altars for the seven gods, but here there were more gods than seven.
Statues of them stood along the walls, massive and threatening. Around their feet red candles flickered, as dim as distant stars. The nearest was a marble woman twelve feet tall. Real tears were trickling from her eyes, to fill the bowl she cradled in her arms. Beyond her was a man with a lion’s head seated on a throne, carved of ebony. On the other side of the doors, a huge horse of bronze and iron reared up on two great legs. Farther on she could make out a great stone face, a pale infant with a sword, a shaggy black goat the size of an aurochs, a hooded man leaning on a staff. The rest were only looming shapes to her, half-seen through the gloom.

Between the gods were hidden alcoves thick with shadows, with here and there a candle burning.
Silent as a shadow, Arya moved between rows of long stone benches, her sword in hand. The floor was made of stone, her feet told her; not polished marble like the floor of the Great Sept of Baelor, but something rougher. She passed some women whispering together. The air was warm and heavy, so heavy that she yawned. She could smell the candles. The scent was unfamiliar, and she put it down to some queer incense, but as she got deeper into the temple, they seemed to smell of snow and pine needles and hot stew. Good smells, Arya told herself, and felt a little braver. Brave enough to slip Needle back into its sheath.

In the center of the temple she found the water she had heard; a pool ten feet across, black as ink and lit by dim red candles.

I don’t really remember if I decided to make the pool larger than ten feet as an artistic licence, or just because as an European I only speak Metric.
Regardless, it was supposed to be the focus of the composition, so it is indeed slightly larger than it’s described in the books.

I’m saying this just in case you are a Game of Thrones fundamentalist and you feel compelled to point this out to me in angry emails:)

by Paolo Puggioni

Game of Thrones – The Archmaester’s key

About a year after I’ve worked on it, The Archmaester’s Key Game of Thrones chapter pack has finally been released, and as it always happens Fantasy Flight Games was so kind to send me a copy of the printed cards.

I’m quite chuffed that the illustration I made for this chapter pack was also on FFG’s store product page🙂

Working on games for so long means that I should be used to seeing my work being published ages after it’s been delivered.
Yet, so much stuff has been going on since then that I almost struggled to remember what this chapter pack was about.

Reading the old briefs I remembered this was the last job I did with FFG Art Director Deb Freytag (who left the company soon after), with whom I had some really pleasant work relationship over the years.

I also realized that I’m an idiot, as I think I lost the original file for the only piece of art I made for this Game of Thrones project, so I’ll be able to post just the lower res one.

On the good side, this realization (that I lost files a few months ago, not that I’m an idiot), eventually led me to the good practice of running multiple, automatic, redundant back-ups, so losing artwork will hopefully be a thing of the past.

More Game of Thrones art next time.

by Paolo Puggioni

Game of Thrones – Time of Plenty

Time of Plenty is the second illustration I made for Game of Thrones’ Lions of Casterly Rock.
If you want to have a look at the first one I posted, it’s right here.

The brief read: In a blood orange grove in Dorne, a pair of Dornish peasants (one male, one female) pick oranges from the trees. Each of the peasants carries a large basket full of oranges, and the trees in the grove are bursting with fruit.

So this is what I came up with:

I remember that when I read Game of Thrones, Dorne left me with images of Andalucia, or Southern Italy, maybe Sicily.
So that’s pretty much where I got my reference from.

I meant to add some Dornish city in the distance (as you can see from the sketch), but in the end it looked too cluttered so I decided against it.

Again, this was one of the first actual drawing I made with Krita, so I did struggle a bit to get the foliage right.
In fact, I had to make a whole new set of brushes specifically for this drawing.
As soon as I have some time I’ll make them all available for download, likely next week.

by Paolo Puggioni

Golden Tooth

Golden Tooth is the first illustration I made for Lions of Casterly Rock, the latest Game of Thrones game expansion by Fantasy Flight Games.

As I said in my previous post, the card is featured together with Lannisport Treasury on the product page, which, random an event as it may be, is still a small satisfaction:)

As it always happens, the expansion has seen its release quite a long time after the art had been produced for it, as – if I remember correctly – I worked on it almost exactly a year ago.
This was also the very first professional illustration I made with Krita, and I have to admit I was quite nervous about it.

Most of the workflow with Krita is no different to that of many other drawing programs, but still, most of one’s productivity relies on muscle memory, and using new tools and brushes when you are on a deadline tends to make you feel dizzy.
The fact that everything went smooth is what eventually convinced me to stick with Linux in general, and Krita in particular.

What really made me think “ok I’m sold”, however, was the natural feel of the sketch brushes.
The one I used for Golden Tooth has evolved a bit since this sketch was made.
Still, the feeling was already pretty close to that of an actual 5B pencil.

The real struggle started with the rendering.
Getting things to a state I was happy with did take some learning.

My usual procedure would normally imply dropping colours on the canvas very loosely, then using a series of mixing brushes to blend them together and drawing finer details in when needed, close to what you would do with wet-on-wet with oils or acrylics.
The mixing brushes that ship with Krita weren’t quite exactly what I needed, so I did spend some time to create my own.
You can see some of the blending brushwork in these spot.

Another hurdle was making custom brushes for the grass on the hills and the stones of the castle walls.
Still, somehow I managed.

These were admittedly a bit primitive, the ones I’m using now are a lot better, I’ll share them when I can.
Apparently there’s a bug in Krita that prevents bundles from including brush tips, so I have to look into that before I can share my own.

I’ll post the other cards I made for Lions of Casterly Rock next time.

by Paolo Puggioni

Lions of Casterly Rock

My copy of Lions of Casterly Rock – Fantasy Flight Games’ latest Game of Thrones expansion – has finally arrived.
I’m quite chuffed that two of the 4 cards previewed on FFG’s website are mine:)
They are Golden Tooth and Lannisport Treasury, which I’ll post in more detail next week.

The box is amazing, as all the packaging by Fantasy Flight Games always is.
Look at that. Sorry for the potato quality.

I’m always happy to have another Game of Thrones thing under my belt, but this one was particularly fun to work on.
It was the first time I had done any professional work using Krita, and I remember being concerned that something would go wrong with tools I wasn’t familiar with and everything else.
Luckily all went smooth.
I’ll post them next week, this time I even remembered to keep the sketches:)

by Paolo Puggioni