Game of Thrones – Khal Drogo’s Funeral Pyre

Game of Thrones – Khal Drogo’s Funeral Pyre

The way picking pages at random works has made it so I haven’t even touched certain characters’ POV chapters yet. So this scene with Daenerys walking into Khal Drogo’s Funeral pyre is the first Daenerys illustration I’ve done. (Actually, I passed up on my first chance. It would have been Dany and Drogo’s “wedding night”. While one of the points of these exercises is to be brutally honest about Game of Thrones’ brutality… I draw the line at statuary rape.)

The first thing to remember when designing Daenerys is she’s thirteen! So no turning her into your sexual fantasy. While pretty, she’s also skinny and won’t be looking like Emilia Clarke for a couple of years.

When I’m researching my source material, I have a problem with beautiful people. Beauty seems to mean a lack of detail. Martin’s description of Dani doesn’t go much farther then platinum blonde, skinny and small breasts. I can’t find any reference to her trademark braids in this book. If she does braid them I have no idea how. (for this picture I punted and assumed she was going deliberately unbraided for the ritual.) All we know about her clothes when she’s with the Dothraki, are a painted vest and riding leathers.

The topic of clothes brings up Dothraki culture. The bodybuilders on horseback from the show don’t make any sense. We know they don’t build, but a culture can’t exist exclusively by pillaging. There must be some crafts. We’re told about them weaving grass, and they must be doing something with the rest of the horses they eat. I spent some time working on their symbolism based on what Martin tells us about their religion.

While they’re meant to fit the Mongol/Hun niche in the book, the Dothraki started making a lot more sense to me when I started basing them on Plains Indian tribes.

Game of Thrones, and A Song of Ice and Fire is the property of George R. R. Martin