The scene is from book five, A Dance With Dragons. The Three-Eyed Crow turns out to be Brynden Rivers, known also as Lord Bloodraven. He is one of Aegon Targaryen IV’s legitimized bastards, a former Hand of the King, Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, and accomplished magical weirdo. He’s a one-eyed albino with a large, vaguely raven-shaped birthmark on his face and neck (thus, Bloodraven), and was rumored to be into all kinds of dark magic.

When Bran meets him he is well over 120 years old, his life span having been artificially extended by merging with the trees. He looks so close to death that Bran’s first assumption is that he’s a corpse. The weirwood trees have bone white bark and blood red five pointed leaves and it’s from Brynden that we begin to learn more about the Old Gods and what makes the weirwood trees so special.

The frame is the first one I’ve actually done myself and I think it came out pretty well all things considered. I wanted to make it almost part of the painting and decided the best way to do that would be to make it look like weirwood. The wood is poplar molding from Lowe’s with about six coats of Varathane Weathered Gray stain followed by painting layers of wood grain shapes over the top of it with thinned acrylic gesso.

I’m going to have work in the “Winter Is Coming” group show at LTD Gallery in Capitol Hill. The show is all work based on the A Song of Ice and Fire books so it is potentially super crazy spoilery if you care about that at all. The stuff I’ve done for it all qualifies as solidly spoiler territory so heads up. I’ll be posting the finished products up here once the show goes up.

Here is a more detailed press release for anyone interested.