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

Rainwood Forest

The Rainwood Forest is one of the last pieces I made for The World of Ice and fire.

I have to confess that after the fairly challenging illustrations I had made prior to this, I found this one quite relaxing.

Just a landscape, trees in the foreground and sea in the background.
God I love the sea.
I didn’t even look up for reference. I just dug from memories of my end-of-Summers in Liguria as a kid.

Liguria, in case you don’t know what I’m talking about, is a region in Italy blessed with an unusual natural set up: steep hills covered in Maritime Pines, abruptly ending in the sea, to give you the best of two worlds.

You can go on a hike by the hills, and wilfully get lost among the trees.
Then at some point the vegetation clears, and you find yourself before an unexpected, spectacular vista.

Sure, usually the sky in the Mediterranean tends to be blue, and not as gloomy as I painted this.
But Liguria does tend to get stormy weather at the end of summer, which is what I had in mind when I started Rainwood Forest.

Rainwood Forest is located near Cape Wrath, and I certainly wasn’t supposed to convey the mild Mediterranean weather here, given the location.
The Castle in the background is Storm’s End, the Ancestral seat of House Baratheon.

Now, I couldn’t help noticing that they had to crop the original illustration for the print, which is zoomed in a bit on the book.

This, alas, changed the composition considerably.
In my intention, Rainwood was pretty much the “main character”, and Storm’s End almost an afterthought. I painted it as an indistict , looming silhouette in the distance.

By zooming in, the castle became a lot more prominent, and unfortunately I didn’t painted enough details in it to support that (it was SO far away in the original painting!).

Long story short, when looking at it now I REALLY feel like drawing some more stuff on the castle. From this distance you should indeed be able to make out murder holes, battlements and such.

Oh well.

Anyway, this Illustration went as smoothly as it could go.
I made just one sketch, which was approved straight away.

I rendered the sketch very quickly (I tend to be quite fast with environments), so much so that I indulged in a lot more details with bushes and Rainwood trees that I would have normally done.

SPECIAL MENTION goes to my friend Caroline, who, moved to pity by the fact that I haven’t yet received my copy, decided to buy me one.
Ah, friends:)

by Paolo Puggioni

Field of Crows

The Field of Crows battle depicts one of the great conflicts occurred in ancient times.
It’s also probably the Illustration where I’ve put the highest number of human figures all together at the same time!

Now, I wasn’t supposed to work on this piece.
My assignment for The World of Ice and Fire would have ended at this Illustration.
Then the project was scaled up a bit, and I was asked to work on three more pieces.
Field of Crows was the most challenging of the bunch, so, as always, I started with that one.

The Illustration depicts the battle between the Dothraki and the Tall Men.
Cities after cities had already fallen to the assembled powers of four Khalasars, led by Khal Haro, Khal Qano, Khal Loso (the Lame), and Khal Zhako.
Eighty thousand riders between the four of them.
Let’s not forget, they would have looked pretty much like this.

To stop their advance, the Kings of Sarnor put aside their quarrels and gathered by the walls of Sarnath, with more than a hundred thousand men.

The battle seemed to be in favour of the Sarnori at first, who trampled the first lines of the Dothraki with their chariots, and going as far as killing Kal Haro in their first attack.
Unfortunately for them the Dothraki, who were already super cool back then, feinted a retreat, and then using their superior mobility eventually surrounded their enemies and cut them to pieces.

For some reason, the battle was remembered as Field of Crows.
Maybe because there were scores of fallen men once it was over?

Anyway, I wasn’t really sure of what moment of the battle I should focus on.
The retreat? The final winning attack of the Dothraki? The moment when they seemed to be losing?
I eventually decided that the first charge would have been the best bit to depict. Still all potential, and the uncertainty of who’s going to win.

I have to confess was a bit concerned of the point of view. Too close and the image would have lost the sense of scale. I had to convey the idea of two BIG armies, after all.
Too far away and the armies would have been two indistinct large groups of people.

This seemed to be the best compromise, and in the end I’m quite happy about the result.
Also, despite it being quite a challenging illustration (lots of people! And horses!) the first sketch was immediately approved, so Field of Crows went as smoothly as it could ever go.

by Paolo Puggioni

Storming of the Dragonpit

Storming of the Dragonpit was the second Illustration I made for the World of Ice and Fire.

Following the principle according to which the most difficult things have to be made first, I started to work at the sketches for Storming of the Dragonpit pretty much at the same time I made those for the Tourney at Harrenhal.

Because of the large amount of human figures involved, both of them kind of gave me nightmares.
In a good way though.

The illustration depicts the events that led to the disappearance of the last dragons from Westeros.
During the unrest of the civil war, a mob of smallfolk stormed the Dragonpit, torched the monumental building and rid the land of their kind.

Despite the many visual elements involved, storming of the Dragonpit was slightly easier for me than the Tourney, at least under a certain point of view.

Yes, there was a whole mob of peasants to be drawn, but that wasn’t the hard thing, I had plenty of time after all.
Also, none of them was a relevant character of the saga, so I could be more relaxed with it.

My real concern was with the dragons.
I happened to work for another Game of Thrones product in the past, and the first dragon I made back then, Balerion, was completely wrong.

As George R.R. Martin pointed out back then, dragons in A Song of Ice and Fire have four limbs. Not 6 like dragons of other settings.
Too bad that information came after I had finished colouring it:)

Anyway, since I never make the same mistake only once, I messed up this first sketch too.

In this case, the issue was with the lore. The dragons were never so close to each other. The structure had to be MASSIVE, the dragons had to be locked in their own “kennels”, the building was domed.

Because of that, the first round of revisions for Storming of the Dragonpit had to do with the scale.

Again, it took a while to get it right. In some of them, as you can see, the dragons are simply ridiculously gigantic, in others are too small.

Eventually, this is the one that got approved.

I still tweaked the composition a bit while rendering, but all in all, after the sketch was greenlit, everything went smoothly, and a couple of weeks later I delivered the image you see at the top of the page.

Next week I’ll post other illustrations for the World of Ice and Fire, posibly in the same order I made them.

by Paolo Puggioni

Game of Thrones is Back

I mean, Game of Thrones the HBO series is back, nothing to do with drawing.
As a matter of fact, I haven’t been posting drawings on my blog in ages!
It’s not that I’ve been lazy, in fact I’ve been working like crazy during the past couple of months.
Unfortunately everything I’ve been working on cannot be disclosed yet, so for the next couple of months I’ll be able to publish only the few spare sketches I’ll manage to slip in my schedule.

Too bad, I had some interesting ideas lined up.
Well, wait, it’s not bad actually, I’m working on pretty cool things, you’ll see.

So, as I said, Game of Thrones is Back. Everyone is pretty excited about it, me included.
I can’t wait to see on screen the events I read in the books. A part from a couple that I’m still trying to get over:(

Anyway, it must be because of the hype around the series, but I keep coming across Game of Thrones related things on the Internet.

The first one is of course George R.R. Martin’s new website.
I think it’s pretty cool (someone pointed out on reddit that it doesn’t look early nineties any longer).
It also displays some pretty cool illustrations on its rotator, one of which is by Michael Kormarck, who made the cover art in the same book I made the back cover of.

If you want to refresh your memory with the events of the past Game of Thrones’ seasons, this awesome map has been created exactly for that purpose. Just scroll down and the map will highlight the places where the events took place, with a brief pop-up summary of what happened.
Actually I should have posted it a few weeks ago, but as I said I’ve been busy, and I have a very crappy memory.

So, just two days to go.
If you want to kill time while you wait, just enjoy this gif. I just look at it every now and then when I need to feel better.
You’re welcome.

 

by Paolo Puggioni

Game of Thrones – Oath of the Nightwatch

There’s still some Game of Thrones artwork I have to post.
Actually with this one I should be pretty much finished.

I haven’t been drawing much lately. Which could be a bit depressing if it wasn’t for this post on Muddy Colors by Petar Meseldzija, which cheered me up a little. Apparently even world-class artists regularly go though periods of low productivity, and it’s not always a bad sign.

As a matter of fact, there’s a whole bunch of things I would like to start working on, and a quite ambitious project for which I might have to involve the friend who made this website for me.
(He doesn’t know it yet. So yes, if you’re reading this, there might be work heading your way at some point:)).

In the meantime, alas, I’m actually going through a period of mental laziness. Even at work it’s more Excel spreadsheets than anything else, which usually sucks the creativity out of anyone.
But things are changing fast around me, so we’ll see what happens in the next future.

Anyway. This is one of the last pieces I made for Green Ronin’s Game of Thrones RPG.
They both depict Men of the Night Watch taking their oath.
The recruits on the left hand side are swearing before a Septon, a priest of the Seven Gods.
The Brothers on the right hand side, faithful to the Old Gods, are instead taking their oath before a Heart-Tree.
That’s how Jon Snow took the Blacks, as any Game of Thrones nerd would know.

Both scenes take place at the end of the day, the sun setting and the night approaching, which is obviously a symbol of the kind of life ahead of them.

As I said before, the chapters about the Night Watch were hands down my favourite in the Game of Thrones books.
The constant threat of the cold, and the evil things creeping inside it, the peculiar, unforgiving code of honour of the Wall. And the grudging dedication of the brothers, for whom the Watch was the only meaningful thing left in life.

Also, their Oath always gives me the chills.

Night gathers, and now my watch begins.
It shall not end until my death.
I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children.
I shall wear no crowns and win no glory.
I shall live and die at my post.
I am the sword in the darkness.
I am the watcher on the walls.
I am the shield that guards the realms of men.
I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.

by Paolo Puggioni

My Game of Thrones Stuff Has Arrived!

When I got home I had the surprise of finding the Game of Thrones Rulebook I worked on waiting for me by the door.
Together with a hungry dog and two ravenous cats of course, but they were no surprise.

To be precise, I got THREE copies (thanks Green Ronin!), which lined up on my shelf, next to the two Campaign Settings, making me look more like a seasoned illustrator rather than an occasional freelancer.
This expansion set is all focused on the Night’s Watch, and the Free Folk who live beyond the Wall. Which is especially cool for me since the parts about the Wall are my favourite in the Game of Thrones series.

There isn’t a single line in the chapters dedicated to the Night Watch that I found less than amazing. I loved the mood, the lingering menace of the Others, the constant struggle against the cold, the hunger and the elements. I loved the fact that there is still ancient magic out there, imbued in the ice of the wall, and just hinted at instead of being waved in your face as it usually happens in other fantasy books.
I loved the entire story developed around Jon Snow, who remained possibly the best character of the entire Game of Thrones series.
And I also loved the Wildlings, which in this Rulebook are developed a lot more than they are in the actual books.

This time there weren’t many “wow factor” illustrations on my schedule, like dragons killing people or the like.
Apart from maybe this one, which this time came up a lot better on print than on screen.

On the other hand, I enjoyed working on a whole lot of characters, which I’ll be posting in the next few days.
The most interesting were without doubt the Wildlings, which seem to have a whole array of different personalities, superstitions and beliefs.
Reading this handbook would be worth it even just to expand what is just suggested in Game of Thrones.

If I can be just a little bit picky, the prints were a bit too dark compared to the original. Next time I’ll remember to avoid dark shadows (I know, tricky when you’re drawing a bunch of people clad in black).
In any case, digital images don’t smell that awesome.

by Paolo Puggioni

Game of Thrones Artwork from The Night Watch

Last year I made a bunch of illustrations for another Game of Thrones RPG rulebook, Green Ronin’s Night’s Watch expansion set.
It’s always a big fat pleasure to be part of something as massively cool as Game of Thrones.
Plus, this time it’s a double pleasure since George R.R. Martin himself mentioned the release on his blog

I know, I’m supposed to act as a professional and consider this as part of the job, nonetheless I couldn’t help giggling like an adolescent when I read that.
I mean, George R.R. Martin put his seal of approval on my stuff:)

Anyway, the drawings.
I’ll post them all in the next few days.
This is a half-page with men of the Night Watch fleeing from a horde of Wildlings descending from the mountains.
I know, I’m being redundant by saying this since the image portrays precisely men of the Night Watch fleeing from a horde of Wildlings descending from the mountains. But in case you were in doubt, that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Now, I was pretty happy about the result when I finished this.
However, looking back at it after all those months there are lots of things I would fix, like the guy’s anatomy (god his posture is awkward), his face and another few things here and there.
The dark side of the hill the chief is standing on could have been lighter, and pushed back in the distance a bit.
Also, the Wildlings are all the same value, with little atmospheric perspective.
Oh well.

While going through George R.R. Martin’s blog posts I also noticed HBO released the teaser for the next season of Game of Thrones.

Nothing much to see, but it does remind me that it’s almost behind the corner.
Damn I can’t wait.
Nonetheless, Mr. Martin, please go back to writing Winds of Winter. That’s the stuff we want!

by Paolo Puggioni

Stannis Baratheon

Another illustration I made for the Game of Thrones RPG.
Stannis is one of the least liked of the series’ characters, poor Stannis.

I’m serious, I feel for him.
He was a second son, which is frowned upon in the Game of Thrones book.
Well, I guess it used to be like that in general a while back.

Anyway. He was skilled in battle, loyal, just and strong. Maybe he wasn’t the soul of the party, but as I always say when people complain about politicians being boring: he’s not there to entertain people, he has to get things done!
And Stannis did.

He kept Storm’s end for months against overwhelming forces, then went on conquering Dragonstone without breaking his stride.
All for his elder brother, and not a pat on his back for it. Instead, he got rewarded with the smaller castle, the one with the crappy weather.
He also married a sickly woman with a big moustache. No wonder he has a frown, who wouldn’t?

People in the Game of Thrones books don’t like Stannis.
He’s not a fun guy, even if he’s not to blame for it. And no one takes him seriously, not even when he wins.

He must have like 3 of out of 10 in Charisma, poor sod.
Which is what I always had when playing role playing games, btw.
Who puts points on Charisma when using Strength is so much more rewarding?
Only bards use Charisma, and no one ever plays with bards, NO ONE.

As predictable as it is, I had to use a cold, grim mood for this drawing.
Stannis is in his grey Dragonstone, frowning as usual, making plans on is table-map, probably being unhappy about something.
Most likely because of the crappy place he had to live in.
I wonder how his image in Game of Thrones might have been different had his castle been decorated with pink curtains and soft fluffy pillows.

by Paolo Puggioni