My Stuff on 2D Artist Magazine

The back cover I made for Game of Thrones have been published, to my great pleasure, on the awesome 2D Artist Magazine.
I can’t deny I feel a bit out of place amongst those amazing artists, yet there I am!

For those who aren’t familiar with it, 2D Artist Magazine is (duh) about 2D digital painting and Concept Art.
It’s not the only magazine around with Photoshop tutorials or general drawing techniques, of course. It is, however, the most professional looking one at the moment. It manages, in fact, to remain appealing to professionals without being too difficult for uninitiated. Which is a great quality to sport, if you consider that most of their competitors often publish tutorials about basic techniques you could easily find in 5 minutes of YouTube browsing.

Maybe it’s clearer if I just paste what they write about themselves:

2DArtist is the magazine for CG artists around the globe, whether you already work in 2D or are just getting started. Each issue is full of techniques, tutorials, interviews, articles, project overviews and galleries – providing the perfect platform from which to improve your 2D skills, learn from the professionals and get inspiration for your next project.

Anyway, this is the section the illustration had been published into.

And this is the issue, you can even browse the preview and have a look at what the other kick-ass people did.

I’m expecting any time someone will tell me they made a mistake, good thing I already saved it on my hard drive.

For the moment, thanks to Matt, Jess and the rest of the 2D Artist Magazine staff for including my in this issue.

by Paolo Puggioni

Color Theory – Direct Light and Diffuse Light

If you’re into painting at all, you should have heard the terms direct light and diffuse light at least once.
They are an important part of colour theory.

(If you are the kind of painter who smears pigeon crap on a bit of canvas and sell it to art galleries, you can disregard the subject of colour theory entirely. Good for you!)

I won’t go into the detail of how direct light and diffuse light affect the perception of colours. Firstly, because the subject is massive. Secondly, better
people than me would give you a much clearer explanation on anything concerning colour theory.

I would just share with you a few basics.

On a sunny, dry day, objects are affected by three kinds of light: the soft blue light coming from the sky, the warm light bouncing from the ground and the sharp white light of the sun.
As a general rule, colours of surfaces facing up would shift towards cold, surfaces facing down would shift towards warm.
Vertical surfaces will in turn be warmer at the bottom and colder at the top.
This is just a rough rule of thumb, yet a pretty good one, keep it in mind!

Now, where are we likely to find this kind of light conditions? Italy is the answer. During the summer, in Italy, the sun shines bright and the sky is a deep, highly saturated blue.
In Italy the blue light bounces off everything, the tanned skin of people, the awesome food and, of course, surfaces facing up. These surfaces create a wonderful contrast with the warm ones facing down, making your paintings vibrant and merry.
Of course, you can’t be sure of the true colour of things because of the saturated light bouncing everywhere. However, why would you care? Just enjoy the awesomeness of colour!

Here’s an example of an Italian town under direct sunlight.

(Credit: I saved this pic from Reddit but I can’t find the thread anymore. If anyone knows it please tell me and I’ll update!)

Diffuse light, on the other hand, is the kind of light you get on an overcast day. That is, what you get under a grey, grim, miserably desaturated sky.
You don’t have significant bounce light under these conditions, or strong contrast between colds and warms. Or well defined edges and shadows, or fuzzy feelings of happiness.
Under outdoor diffuse light you get flat, depressing colours, and gradients from grey to slightly less grey.
Where’s the best place to paint a landscape under diffuse light?
England of course.
If for some reason you really want to paint under a cloudy sky, and possibly rain, that’s your place.
For colour theory’s sake, here’s an example of an average English landscape under average English light conditions.

As you can see, England can boast an entire range of greys. All the shades of grey are here, mostly dull greys but also some greenish greys and a few grey browns.

You can get to love them after a while.
It’s a bit more difficult if, like myself, you’ve just came back from a place with other colours and you’ve run out of holidays until January next year.
But yes, you can get to love them.
After a while.

by Paolo Puggioni

Office Doodles

Maybe one should’t draw doodles at important meetings.
However, very few people in art teams I’ve worked with don’t exit meeting rooms with pages full of doodles and maybe a couple of notes.

My favourite doodle session is the recurring Monday Runescape Lead Artists meeting.
Ok it’s not an official doodle session, it’s more the occasion when the Art Manager and the leads of Animation, Characters, Environments, Concepts and UI meet to discuss ongoing and future projects, issues, ideas and such.

But it’s the most relaxed meeting of the week, the guys I work with are great, and when they start talking about nodes and flags polys then doodling ensues.

Last Monday I decided to take home a couple of them.
I also coloured one, as you can see below.
It’s just meh, something I did while watching the last two episodes of Prison Break Season two and packing for my holidays.
Anyway, there it is.

As I said, it’s not the best drawing in the world
The ship hasn’t got a proper design, there are barely any details, the clouds are crap and the sails are, well, average quality.

So, it won’t make it to my portfolio, but I think that as a Monday meeting doodle is more than enough.

By the way, I also took notes of course. They were just in another page.

by Paolo Puggioni

A Song of Ice and Fire Ranks

This is the last one I made for A Song of Ice and Fire Campaign Guide.
I haven’t received the books yet so I can only imagine what it refers to.
Ranks in Game of Thrones, maybe? That’s the title of the image at least:)

The brief asked for a middle aged lord, well built, salt and pepper hair and a grave look.
He seems to be listening to someone, his fingers on the blade of the long sword sitting on his lap.
It seems like he wouldn’t mind chopping the head off whoever he is listening to.
A lady is standing by his side, her hand on his shoulder as through trying to keep him calm.

The seat and the sword hilt are both carved in the likeness of a bull, which I figure must be the symbol of the house.
I can’t wait to get the rule book to shed some light on this lord, I have read all the Game of Thrones books but this description doesn’t ring a bell.

This is the one I found most difficult in the bunch of illustrations I made for A Song of Ice and Fire.
There were a lot of elements to show: the bull, the lord, the lady, the sword, the seat, and I struggled quite a bit to have them work together in the composition.

In the end I think it’s not that bad. The eye should go from the sword up to the lord, then run on the lady’s arm to her face, and following the creases on her dress back to the sword again, enclosing the point of interest in a circle.
At least that was my intention.
To emphasise this I also put some lights around the top half of the characters, which are now backlit by what could be the dying embers of a hearth.

All in all I’m not unhappy with the result, even though I came back to it a few times to fix things here and there, making it less fresh and immediate than I would have wanted.

This is it for this batch of illustrations of A Song of Ice and Fire.
The next one will be in a few weeks, hopefully.
So for some time it will be personal work, if I’m not too distracted by all the TV series starting in August.

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

Runescape Reaches 200 Millions Accounts

Last Thursday Runescape reached the 200 Millions Accounts mark.
Not bad for a game which has been around for more than ten years eh?

If I’m not wrong we’re also in for a Guinness world record.
Which is cool, because I like the idea of winning a Guinness record without having to do something outright crazy like eating a van full of sausages or things like that.

Anyway, we have a big huge monitor in the hall at Jagex, with a counter reading the Runescape accounts created. Same as the one you see on our website.
On Thursday all the Runescape team gathered in front of the screen waiting for THE MOMENT, then everyone cheered at the 200 millionth account, and there was a party and everything.

Everyone but me I mean, and the other Concept Artists.
We were out of office for our training, damn it.
Really, crap, we totally missed it.
I won’t even post what we drew for our training because screw it.
Happy for the result though, I hope EVERYONE ELSE enjoyed the moment.

Now that I think of it this post is making me sad, you could have waited another day to register those new accounts, dear players. I’ve been looking at that counter for weeks, thinking “hey nearly there!”.
Damn it.

Anyway, big success. There are articles about it on pretty much all the gaming websites.
This is the article on Kotaku, then Videogamer.com, Metro, and IGN amongst others.

However, it kind of sucks that they all posted 7-8 years old graphics and not the new, shiny, pretty ones we are releasing now.
Oh well.

This is an info-graphic we’ve been preparing for a while.
I think the data displayed are pretty impressive.
Congratulations Runescape, I hope that for the 300 Millions celebrations I’ll be at my desk.

by Paolo Puggioni

A Dragon Hunting Sheep

After some struggle I finally managed to finish the dragon I sketched a couple of weeks ago.
This one has been a bitch. I made a first coloured version, and it sucked. The face of the dragon was awful, the colours were all wrong, the composition was meh.
So I did what every decent artist does when their work is unsatisfying: I moved the drawing to the trash and I started from scratch.

I’m quite happy about this last one, even though there are still quite a few things I would do differently if I could go back in time.
For a start, his head could be more tilted sideways to avoid breaking his teeth against the ground while dropping on the first sheep at full speed.
I meant to give him a flat under-throat, like a crocodile’s, to emphasise this. Then I ended up with something closer to a pelican pouch, which after all makes sense for a big predator used to swallow whole sheep three at a time.
I’m not sure whether this last solution works better or not. If this were a paid commission I’d draw two versions just to make sure.
Anyway.

The other thing I’m not entirely happy with is his body. The middle section doesn’t follow the curve suggested by the tail, or at least it does it only partially.
The dragon is supposed to make a sharp turn around the top of the hill and then drop on the sheep. Maybe his body could be more twisted?
Again, I would experiment more if this were proper work. Thing is, other ideas sprang to mind while I was working on this, and I just wanted to move on to the next one.

For the environment I took inspiration from the peaks in West Yorkshire, where I lived for a few years.

Those barren, dull-green hills under that constantly grey sky.
The reign of diffuse, unsaturated light, with the occasional, enterprising beam trying to pierce resilient clouds always heavy with rain. Often unsuccessfully.
I thought it would have been the right background for a dragon, especially because that beam of light would have been useful to put the focal point under some kind of spotlight.

Plus, I didn’t mean to draw the magical/smart/ancient/wise/treasure-hoarder kind of dragon. This one is more of a predator with just the basic instincts of flying and hunting.
The Peak District seemed to me quite appropriate for this kind of scenario.
Hills, sheep, savage nature and rain. And a dragon looming over all this.

Image with the process below.

by Paolo Puggioni

A Song of Ice and Fire Characters – Renly Baratheon

Again, another character for the Game of Thrones RPG.
Renly Baratheon is the youngest of the Baratheon brothers.
Young, handsome, charming and somehow frivolous, I have to confess he is one of the characters I liked the least.
Yet I’m quite happy about how he turned out.

In my mind he was pretty much a spoiled brat.
When Robert and Stannis rode around the Seven Kingdoms wreaking havoc, he stayed safe at home playing with his toys.
I know he couldn’t help it because he was too young, and yet there he was.

When Robert eventually won the kingdom, Renly was given the biggest castle, even if he never fought a battle in his entire life.
Ok, there were reasons, but he could have at least acknowledged the fact that he didn’t deserve any of what he got and say thanks.
Just “thanks guys, you did the hard job and I’m enjoying your stuff, I love you” would have been enough for me.

If Game of Thrones were set in this century, Renly would be the rich twat spending his days driving daddy’s SUV and being awesome with the girls.
Anyway.

By the Game of Thrones books Renly used to love dressing all pretty, he had a shiny, finely decorated enameled armour which, I figure, was not exactly designed for a real battle.
He looked great in it though.
For the armour I referenced heavily to a really cool plate armour I saw at the British Museum. It had been crafted for a prince (I don’t remember who to be honest) and I think it would have suited Renly pretty well.

A friend of mine pointed out that his face seems a bit too polished compared to the rest of the drawing, but I actually meant to paint his face as clean as possible, so I think it works fine.
Any more details would have made him look older, or possibly tougher than I meant to.
I see him as a young, unexperienced pretty guy wearing an expensive armour, I didn’t want him to look like a great warrior.
Understood Renly? You’re not a great warrior!

by Paolo Puggioni

Other GOT Characters – Mord

Another character I designed for Green Ronin’s Game of Thrones – A Song of ice and Fire Campaign Guide.
Mord is a minor character in the Game of Thrones series, but he has an interesting personality.

He is the jailer at the Eyrie, he is brutal, half witted and at his best quite unpleasant.
By the description given in the books he is quite obese, with stained teeth and a lopsided skull, this as a result of an axe blow that just accentuated his god-given ugliness.
His favourite past time is teasing and torturing his prisoners, who are held in cells open on the side of the impossibly tall cliff the Eyrie is built on.
Most times detainees jumped in the void out of desperation, in equal measure due to the incessant winds, the tempting heights and Mord’s mistreatments.

What I meant to convey were his viciousness and dimness, only partially mitigated by his avidity.
Which, now that I think of it, are recurring traits of most secondary Game of Thrones characters.

As a side note, halfway through the process I realised my Mord looked like someone I knew, but I couldn’t point my finger on it.
Then it eventually dawned on me that he looked pretty much like the evil twin of what people considered the Fool in my old home town, back in Italy.
I remember I was pretty much one of the few who liked to talk to the guy. He wasn’t a fool at all, but he didn’t mind others to believe him such.
It lowered expectations and eased the pressure, he said. Also, he could afford to insult people in the middle of the street and yell swearwords every time he pleased, which is undoubtedly fun, cathartic and not at all frowned upon when you’re considered the Town Fool.

Awesome person, but yes, he was as ugly as a night on the toilet.
Once I realised where I was heading to, I just decided to go with the flow, and tried my best to stick to the face I had in mind. Minus the scar and the missing ear of course.
I don’t think he’s ever seen giving his back to the void in the Game of Thrones books (lest he got happily pushed over by his prisoners). But I chose to take this liberty to make who he was clearer.
As if keys and chains weren’t enough.

by Paolo Puggioni

King Robert

Green Ronin has just released its update to A Song of Ice and Fire Campaign Guide, another Game of Thrones RPG Rulebook I’ve worked on.
This is King Robert Baratheon, after the Battle of the Trident events which led to his ascent to the Iron Throne.

I could have depicted him in many ways.
Robert was as quick to laughter as he was to rage, he was bold and charming, and the most fearsome warrior of his times.
As a character he could have been suited well both holding a horn of ale or bored to death while attending to one of the kingly duties he loathed so much.
He seemed to enjoy just the idea of being a king, but not so much all the responsibilities that came with the position.

For this particular illustration I chose to see him already ahead in his life, aged by the burdens of the Iron Throne, the intrigues of his court and the excesses he was used to.
According to the Game of Thrones books, he couldn’t fit into his old armour any more. However, I figured he would love to wear some battle garments here and there, as a reminder of how he was.

Unfortunately by the time they offered me the assignment I was already working on something else, so I could only accept a limited amount of illustrations.

Which sucks, because the characters for this assignment were all pretty cool, and I enjoyed the job quite a lot.
Also, I had just finished reading the second book of the Game of Thrones series, and I had their faces (or how my mind imagined them) still vivid in my mind.

I’ll post some more characters in the next few days.
And I’ll stay by the door waiting for the postman to deliver my second big shiny book🙂

by Paolo Puggioni