Behind The Scenes: Game of Thrones World (Patreon)

It's not that often that a major franchise has a new release, so obviously I was getting ready for some new Game of Thrones themes with the release of House of the Dragon TV show. So far, I love the show, but I didn't see any major scenes that would capture my attention that much.

But that won't stop me from enjoying some GoT themes in my work after some time since the original show finished. I was browsing through some references and find myself unable to pick some particular scene. I simply wanted to do all of them. And why not? I enjoyed making some movies and TV isometric mashups, and HP universe already got this treatment, so I might as well continue with GoT.

Visit the full Pinboard here

I dug deeper and tried to collect all of the major places from GoT. At the same time, I needed to pace myself, because from previous experience, there's only a limited amount of things you can put on your artwork until it feels overcrowded.

I settled on few main locations, like Red Keep, Winterfell, Mereen, Twins, Wall and Great Grass Sea, that would nicely round up the different biomes and offer a nice color variety. You can see how even during a research phase, you can already think about composition and colors in advance.

Of course to make these locations a bit more interesting, you need some additional details and focal points. You don't need much, sometimes, it's just a small detail that will enhance otherwise flat and empty building. For example the harpy statue on top of the Mereen pyramid. 

I went ahead and sketched out the layout to place these different biomes on their own islands and used proximity of them to place the Twins with the bridge too. I played with the scale of the details and decided to make them oversized, so they are visible and recognizable and offer a nice contrast to very simplified buildings.

That's why you can see really large direwolf, throne and dragon in there. It really helped to move the design even further from realism into more infographic and stylized realm and allowed for really colorful and cartoon treatment.

You can watch the process video on Youtube