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