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