The illustration below belongs to the bunch I made for the Game of Thrones expansion Sands of Dorne, by Fantasy Flight Games.

I actually received the box set quite a while ago, but I got distracted by something shiny and I forgot to brag about it.

Look how pretty it is:

I LOVE everything about the fact that illustrators get to receive an actual physical thing to put on a shelf and look at.
I like the smell of the new cards when you open them, I like too browse the other illustrators’ work, I even like the postman going “something from the States for you”.
You kind of loose that working in video games, with Playstation online store and all that.

Anyway, Sands of Dorne has been sitting on my shelf for a couple of months now, so it’s about time I share the illustrations in it.

The one below is called Peace and Prosperity, and it depicts one of the gates of King’s Landing, during on of those brief hiatus when people weren’t killing each other.

It’s a bit of a bummer that the final version of the card cropped a lot from the original, but hey, it happens.

For the guy in the foreground I took as a reference an old master’s painting, if I remember correctly.
Unfortunately that’s as far as my memory goes, so in lieu of more details about it I can only offer the original sketch.

As part of the feedback, I had to move things around and rearrange various elements, so the coloured version differs from the sketch a little bit.

Interestingly, I wasn’t really sure about what kind of crest the banners at the gate of King’s Landing would display at this point of the story.

This is when Geoffrey was king, and I didn’t know whether the flags of the city would fly the Lannisters’ flags or those of the Baratheons.

The art director was very happy to start a discussion about it, and as it turns out, at that time they would use a hybrid banner with the crests of both houses.
The more you know..

Anyway, more Sands of Dorne illustrations next week.
Oh, as usual, made with Krita.

By Paolo Puggioni