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