About Free Software

Look Internet, I’m back online!

It’s been – gosh – 6 months since my last post.

In the meantime I’ve moved house and city, worked on some projects I can’t yet talk about, burned a computer, bought a new one, started to work out like a maniac, and done some other things that right now you may or may not care about.

Anyway.

The only topic really relevant to an art blog such as this, is that as a consequence of losing my iMac, I had to look into alternatives.

Since I couldn’t afford another Mac, I had to go back to PC.

It wasn’t an easy choice, and to be honest I couldn’t find on the market another monitor that was anywhere near as good as my Mac’s. God, that screen was so nice and crisp that sometimes I wanted to lick it.

The problem with this (monitor aside) was that I’m not a fan of Windows. AT ALL.
Especially since the entire Windows 10 looks more like a malware than an actual OS.

I really, really tried to like it, but as the days passed, as random events occurred, as pop ups warned me of downloads, requests to fetch this, send that to some place, or more and more things behaved erratically in genuine Windows style, I realized I felt as if I had no control over the machine I paid for.

Which led me to my point: I ditched Windows and finally moved to Free Software, namely Linux Mint KDE.

[Break] Now get this random bunch of sketches because I’ve written too much without posting any picture.

Where was I. Free Software. I feel strongly about it.
Keep in mind that “free” is not for “free of charge” (even when it is).

From the GNU Project page:

“Free software” means software that respects users’ freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software” to show we do not mean it is gratis.

We campaign for these freedoms because everyone deserves them. With these freedoms, the users (both individually and collectively) control the program and what it does for them. When users don’t control the program, we call it a “nonfree” or “proprietary” program. The nonfree program controls the users, and the developer controls the program; this makes the program an instrument of unjust power.

Now, as a professional, all this would be sadly unfeasible for me to support if Linux didn’t provide the tools I regularly use for my work.
I had tried alternatives to Photoshop in the past, and they all turned out as being little more than toys, lacking features and speed I needed.
Even a behemoth like Corel Paint doesn’t get close to it, at least in my opinion.

It was with a mixture of awe and delight then, that I found out about Krita, the most popular painting program in Linux.
Oh – my -God, Krita.
If any fellow Concept Artist comes across this post, please do yourself a favour and give it a try.

(It’s nothing like GIMP, before you ask).
It’s also available for Windows.
But if you want to try it out in its natural environment, remember that you can run any Linux distro from a simple USB.
How cool is Linux?

Anyway, I won’t go into all the details of why and how painting with Krita makes me so happy (I’ll do it in my next post though).

This one is just to share with you the fact that I moved away from proprietary software, that I’m thrilled and enthusiastic about it, and that I managed to use free software in my professional work without barely breaking my stride.
Also, that I’ll talk about it profusely in the future.

More on this next time.

by Paolo Puggioni

Other Runescape Concepts

As I said a while ago, I still have a folder full of concepts I made for Runescape that I never had the chance to publish.

Unfortunately my memory is what it is, and most of the times I have just a fuzzy recollection of what those concepts were for.
(No, it’s not because I partied too much during the nineties, my memory was already shit way before then).

Anyway, I do remember that these environments were made for Ashdale, the new starting spot meant to replace the venerable Tutorial Island, which had been there since forever.
The game-play for new players was confusing at best back then (not a quality that a tutorial is supposed to have, right?), and at some point a couple of years ago we took on the task of reworking that part of Runescape.

To prepare for that, I spent quite a few weeks working on a 3D model of Ashdale on Sketchup.
Unfortunately I forgot to take it with me, so it’s kind of lost forever.
Which is a bit sad, I was quite happy with that grey box.

It took several weeks for me to fine tune the foot print to accommodate all the requirements of design and at the same time make it as pretty as we meant to.
Loads of plans, meetings, walks to people’s desk, tweaks and then other meetings and then other tweaks.
Sketchup is wonderful for that.

After we had settled on what went where, we started with the actual concepts.
This is a sketch I made of one of the big statues that now stand between the main island and the church.

Again, just a sketch, we changed the statues and the footprint a lot after that.

The following is instead a view of the South side of the island, with its quarry and the small pier.
I painted this on top of a Sketchup screen-grab.
That’s pretty much what I use it for when I’m designing complex environments.

I can’t find in-game screenshots of this bit, but I remember it being fairly close to the sketch, which always fills a Concept Artist’s heart with fuzzy feelings.

I also remember that after this I had to move onto another project, so other people had to finish the whole tutorial thing.

Bonus content: in the Concept folder I just came across the desktop wallpaper I had on my main machine for four years.
I present you THE BEST IMAGE ON THE ENTIRE INTERNET.
You’re welcome.

by Paolo Puggioni

Some News and Some Mummies

I have been very, very lazy with my blog recently.

So much so that I haven’t even posted about some pretty big massive news about my new (umm what’s the word?) working situation?

Well, first off I’m not working at Jagex anymore.

No more Runescape, no more Friday Pub lunch with fellow Concept Artists and Art Director, no more amazing training days to London museums.

I had an amazingly good time at Jagex, and the people there are the best bunch I’ve ever worked with, I’ll truly miss a whole lot of them.

I know, people often say that when they leave a workplace, but I did leave some good friends behind, so it was quite tough to go away.

Good luck mates, I’m sure I’ll see some of you around (no really, this industry is ridiculously small, I met four ex-colleagues at the new job. I’m bound to work again with someone from Jagex at some point).

On the other hand, after more than four years on the same project and little more, I really needed a breath of fresh air, which is why I’m also very happy to work at Sumo now, on Little Big Planet.

I have just started, so it will be a long time before I will be able to post anything of what I’m doing here.

Plus, it’s also taking quite some time and effort to adapt to a completely new game, so well, don’t hold your breath for that.

Luckily, while clearing my machine the day I left, I found a whole bunch of Concepts I made for Runescape that I had neglected to share.

So it looks like I will have some material to post for the next few weeks (more about my recent laziness in my next post).

These three guys below are, as anyone can see, mummies.

I have no memory of where and when they were plugged into the game, if I remember correctly they were part of a big update, but for one reason or another they didn’t manage to go live for quite some time.

This is what one the old Mummies looked like, just so you know.

Modellers at Jagex did an amazing job translating the new mummies in 3D, but what made me jump up and down with joy were the animations.

Unfortunately I can’t find anything on the internet to link. If you happen to come across the new mummies with their animations give me a shout.

That’s all I have for now, I’ll post some more Runescape stuff in the near future.

by Paolo Puggioni

Prints Available

Prints of my artwork are now available, woo-hoo!

So, you can order individual prints directly from the big red SHOP link right above (or click HERE if you’re really THAT lazy).

There’s pretty much everything I deemed worth printing, from my personal work and from the client work I was actually allowed to print.

For the moment that means pretty much lots of Game of Thrones stuff, both from A Song of Ice and Fire RPG and The World of Ice and Fire.

Unfortunately most of the artwork I made for the Lord of The Rings or for Pathfinder cards was made, well, at card size, and it didn’t look great when scaled up.

Anyway, all prints are made on awesome High Quality 190gsm paper, just so you know.

People from ITSART have been so incredibly nice to make my World of Ice and Fire prints available on their site too.

At the moment there’s a nice offer for a signed Limited Edition pack.
So quick, go have a look there! There are only 200 left!

As always, thanks to Papermoustache for the work behind the scenes to put the shop up.

It’s all elegant and shiny, as you can see if you go t the Shop and play with the filters.
Plus, it works.

Edit: since WP places a sad, empty box in home page if there’s no image displayed in the last Blog post, here’s a nice picture of Papermoustache.

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

Titan of Braavos

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 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

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

Tourney at Harrenhal

The Tourney at Harrenhal was the first illustration I made for The World of Ice and Fire, so it makes sense for me to post this first.

I received the briefs for my World of Ice and Fire illustrations all at the same time.
After a good read at the text (hey, I read some of it before you people!), I had decided that the Tourney was the most challenging, so I tackled it first.
Here it is.

I do this all the time, by the way. Once I get the most difficult thing out of the way, the rest feels like a walk in the park.

Anyway. What concerned me back then was that I had to depict a crowd, and in this particular case I couldn’t get away with a blurry background with random faces.
For the Tourney at Arrenhal, the crowd was the thing.

George R.R. Martin, in fact, wanted all the main characters in the audience to be easily recognisable.
Most of the main characters in the saga are depicted here: King Aerys, Princess Elia, her brother Prince Oberyn, Lord Arryn, the knights of the Kingsguard including Ser Arthur Dayne, Ser Gerold Highower, Prince Lewyn Martell, all the Stark siblings, Robert, Jon Connington, Ashara Dayne.

This meant I needed to do some research, and think carefully about their arrangement.

I can’t deny that getting the composition right for the Tourney at Harrenhal gave me a few headaches. Since all the faces had to be recognisable, I had to keep the main stage quite frontal. At the same time Rhaegar couldn’t be seen from behind, and had to be on the left side of the spread.

I also had to depict Harrenhal, and convey its size, the fact that it was partially in ruins, and all that.
It did take some tweaking, I must confess.

Below are my personal sketches to try and figure out value masses, how to light the scene and experiments of the sort.
I never showed them to the art directors, they were just doodles to figure things out.
I made many more, but I can’t find them, sorry.

This is the first sketch. The subsequent revisions were just small (albeit important) tweaks, so I’m not posting them here.

Now, as far as the story goes, The Tourney at Harrenhal is possibly the most important event in the Song of Ice and Fire setting.

Rhaegar, as the winner of the Tourney, had the right to choose his Lady by dropping the Queen of Beauty’s laurel on her lap.
Instead of choosing his betrothed, Princess Eliana Martell, he picked Lyanna Stark, going as far as forcing her to stay with him.

Needless to say, this pissed a lot of people off. All the events you will read in A Song of Ice and Fire originate from this choice, and we really wanted to get this topical moment right.

Here’s a bit of the feedback I got:

We’ve always imagined that the perfect image of the tourney at Harrenhal would kind of let you pick out all these figures in the stands, each with their different reactions when “the smiles died”.

Jon Arryn and Robert and Lord Hunter joking a moment before what was happening dawned on them, Ned watching as Rhaegar was about to stop in front of his sister (who must have been seated quite close), mad Aerys glowering in the distance, Elia stiff-backed and trying to act as if nothing was wrong, Jon Connington probably looking vaguely sad (read: jealous), and so on.

We went through several stages of feedback for this Illustration, and George R.R Martin even sent me pictures of his personal diorama so that the idea he had in mind was perfectly clear.

After further feedback, more research, and a few months’ hiatus to allow the authors to finish the text, we got to the Illustration you see at the top.
Yes, the perspective is a bit “fake”. There were things to fit in the page: the gutter, the faces and so on.

This is the best I could do, right?

Anyway, more to come soon!

by Paolo Puggioni

The World of Ice and Fire

The World of Ice and Fire is out, as you can see here, and I can finally say: “I worked on it too!”.

Thousands of Game of Thrones fans were eagerly awaiting it, but possibly not as much as all the artists who have been working on it for – umm how long? – at least a couple of years I think.

I, for one, couldn’t wait to publish all this work, even just to show friends and family why I spent a respectable number of nights working after I had just got home from work.

It was EXTREMELY tiring, but I loved every minute of it.

To those who haven’t been following the teasers for this release, I’ll give the rough idea I have been giving to my friends: The World of Ice and Fire is to A Song of Ice and Fire what the Silmarillion is to The Lord of The Rings.
Ok, it’s not exactly that.
But you get the idea.
It’s about what happens before A Song of Ice and Fire.

The author explains what it’s all about in this interview:

I can’t describe how happy and proud I am to be among all the amazing artists who made The World of Ice and Fire one of the best illustrated books in a long time.
As a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire myself, this has been for me the equivalent of illustrating The Lord of The Rings directly for Tolkien.

At some point George R.R. Martin even had one of the publishers send me pictures of his personal dioramas, as a reference for one of my illustrations.
I giggled. Very unprofessionally, but I giggled with glee.

So, this has been such a great effort that I feel I must thank some people.

First of all, Rosebud Eustace and Delia Greve of Becker&Meyer, who have been helping (and enduring) us ALL along the way.
Then of course the people at Random House.
Last but not least, my wife, for sitting next to me all those nights watching TV Series and helping in lots of different ways.

I published all my World of Ice and Fire illustrations in their own page here.
However, I’ll also write a detailed blog post for each one over the next few days.

by Paolo Puggioni