The Titan of Braavos is the third Illustration I made for the World of Ice and Fire.

As I said before, when I’m assigned a bunch of Illustration I always try and start with the most challenging one and work my way down from there.

The Titan of Braavos was one of the pieces I thought would have gone most smoothly.
I already had it painted, vividly, it in my head.
A statue of big guy, made of bronze, in front of a coastal city.

I like painting waves, I like painting human figures, and I’m very comfortable ad drawing environments.
So, no big deal. I knew that it would have been one of the easy illustrations.

Well, I was wrong.

To cut a long story short, the sketch that was eventually approved was number twelve.

Now, one of the reasons why the Titan of Braavos took so many attempts was because, by the time I started it, the authors hadn’t written that part yet, and the information about it weren’t easily available.

If you compare the first bunch of sketches with the final illustration I posted at the top, you’ll realize how blurry my idea of the Titan and its surroundings really was.

After these completely failed sketches, I finally found out how the Titan of Braavos is actually supposed to look like.

“His legs bestrode the gap, one foot planted on each mountain, his
shoulders looming tall above the jagged crests.

His legs were carved of solid stone, the same black granite as the sea monts on which he stood, though around his hips he wore an armored skirt of greenish bronze.
His breastplate was bronze as well, and his head in his crested halfhelm.

His blowing hair was made of hempen ropes dyed green, and huge fires
burned in the caves that were his eyes.
One hand rested atop the ridge to his left, bronze fingers coiled about a knob of stone; the other thrust up into the air, clasping the hilt of a broken sword.”

So, I came up with this second bunch of sketches, which also turned out being slightly off the mark.

Now, the thing that makes the Titan of Braavos unique (and that according to George R.R. Martin has been depicted the wrong way by most of the artists who preceded me), is that it’s not a statue placed on top of rocks as I drew it in the first designs.

His legs are actually carved out of big rocks, but those rocks happen to be already there, sticking out of the sea, as a part of the circle of mountains that surrounds the bay.
On top of those legs-shaped rocks they build the rest of the body, a massive bronze fortress now known as The Titan.

Once I finally got this, the following sketches were just about scale and moving things around a bit, which led to the final illustrations of the Titan of Braavos which you see at the top.

by Paolo Puggioni