Other GOT Characters

Here are another couple of characters from the series I drew for Green Ronin’s Game Of Thrones RPG, A Song of Ice and Fire.
I can’t really tell which part of the book the Knight in the Snowstorm is in, the brief was simply about a knight having a hard time in a snowy landscape, and here he is.

The second character is a generic bandit of the many who infest the forests of Westeros.
There are many of this kind in the Game of Thrones book, preying on weaker travellers and being generally mean.
In this particular illustration the villain is waiting for his victim to appear from a clearance in the forest.

I can’t decide whether I made a mistake with the composition or not.
My intention was to convey “wait” and “something is about to happen coming from that side”. However, it might be that the bright patch on the right and the guy staring at it drag the eye outside of the canvas too much. I hope I managed to achieve some balance, I was close to the deadline and I didn’t have much time left for thumbnails at that point.

by Paolo Puggioni

Another Game Of Thrones Illustration, A Sellsword

I don’t know exactly what part of the books this drawing refers to.
There are several rogue warriors and sellswords in Game of Thrones, I guess this would be a generic, less important villain.
The brief was about a sellsword showing off a severed head (which I would assume he dutifully separated from the rest of the owner).
I took the chance to experiment with lighting, I’m quite happy about how it turned out.

by Paolo Puggioni

A Game Of Thrones, Artwork From the RPG

I’ve been allowed to publish some of the artwork I’ve recently done for the RPG of A Game Of Thrones by Green Ronin (yay!)
In the next few days I’ll upload some illustrations from the first batch of inside art.

This is Balerion the Black Dread, the biggest dragon that ever lived.
According to the brief, his teeth are as long as swords, and his mouth could swallow a mammoth whole.
As a Concept Artist it’s difficult to imagine a better thing to work on.

It was been great fun to do, even though I have to admit I completely messed up the assignment and I had to redraw it from scratch after the first feedback.
Dragons in George R.R. Martin’s world have no arms. That is, they obviously have hind legs, whereas their arms evolved into wings, as it happens in bats.
I honestly hadn’t thought of that (Dragons in other settings can be quadrupedal with wings as a further set of limbs) and I’ll make sure I’ll get this clarified next time I’ll be asked to draw one.

Anyway, I’m posting the one that got rejected below. It’s not that bad, there are just two spare arms in the composition 🙁
Thanks to Green Ronin for allowing me to post this so soon.

by Paolo Puggioni

Painting Black Skin, A Shaman

Painting black skin can be quite tricky, at least for me. Dark skin gets highlights in a completely different way from White or Asian, and can go all the way to white. It’s difficult to get it right.

I started this painting a couple of days ago, as nothing more than a doodle. I had just finished a freelance assignment, and after the incredible amount of refinement and detailing I had put in it, I just wanted to paint something just for fun, as loosely as possible.
So I randomly got a sketch from the series I posted a while ago and started to develop it a bit further.
Then I got stuck, I had just painted an Oompa-Loompa.

I started again, and managed to paint someone with an orange artificial fake-tan. I was getting close.

The third time I removed most of the reds and got the base colour almost right. After that, most of the work was done. By looking at reference pictures I noticed that dark skin bounces back a lot less light than white skin (duh!), apart from some areas around the eyebrows and nose, which are more reflective.
Painting the rest was just fun, and since I kept the layers I also exported a gif of the process.

I couldn’t help noticing that most of the creative part (the fun bit) is done in the first two-three frames, the rest is pretty much polishing.
I must ponder on that.

Towards the end – hey, all this took less than two hours, that’s unlike me – I felt the urge to think of a more creative name than “untitled1.psd”, and I just didn’t want to call him “Black Guy With a Fuchsia Headscarf”.
So I painted a few tacky ornaments on his head and there you go, a Shaman.

by Paolo Puggioni

The Lich – This Time With Colours

The Lich is the King of the undead world, no one argues about it. Where people’s opinion is split about the scariness of Slow Zombies vs. Fast Zombies (the latter being obviously the scariest), the Lich holds the position of the undisputed badass.
A Lich could bully around even a Vampire, and I’m not talking about frickin Edward, I’m talking about a real, old, pissed off Vampire.
A Lich could take on a Vampire any time, they’re that scary.

So, I meant to make some experiments colouring the pencil sketch I did a few days ago,then I thought than any colour other than blues would have made it too “merry”. So well, I went with a pretty classic palette. I hope I made it badass enough.

Also, since after all those years I dared to open the Animation Window in Photoshop, I put together all the WIPs in a practical Gif.
It moves!

Thanks to fellow redditor Pit107 for the idea.

by Paolo Puggioni

Black Djinn part II

I’ve finished colouring the Djinn I started last week.
Contrarily to what I do most of the times (that is, open Photoshop and start drawing), this time round I did some planning first: I thought of the composition, which areas to focus on, how to make the various elements of the drawing support the area of main interest and so on.
I’m quite happy with the result, if I won’t hate it in a week it means it’s a keeper!