One of my favorite shows, Game of Thrones, is back today and I thought it’d be fun to illustrate something thematic to celebrate the occasion.

I’ve been working on a new art series I’m calling “collectives” that bring together different characters from all over the pop culture landscape and this Mother of Dragons piece is the first one I’m publishing.

You can probably guess what the “collective” in question is.

I originally rejected this idea because I figured I didn’t have the skill to render visually distinct versions of Drogon from GoT, Draco from Dragonheart, and Smaug from The Hobbit. At the risk of sounding like a bigot, all these dragons look the same to me. But then I did some more research and realized that there have been enough interesting depictions of dragons through the years that I could cherry-pick from various shapes, sizes, and media.

I tried really hard to remain faithful to the proportions of each dragon I eventually chose, although in some cases, I had to guess what their “real world” size might be. Once I knew which ones to include, it all came down to the rendering, which turned out to be 10% sketching and 90% dragon scales. My drawing program doesn’t have pattern brushes so I had to hand-draw each of the dragon scales (and the swords on the Iron Throne of course), which it turns out was a strangely therapeutic activity for a particularly stressful month.

Can you name all 9 dragons in this drawing? The answers in the comments!

If you liked this image, please follow me on Twitter or Instagram!