This is a work in progress "fan art" illustration I've been creating as a collaboration piece with artist and designer Adam Levermore, who was kind enough to create the dragon illustration for this piece! I have been a fan of Adam's work for years and it was a pleasure working with him on this project. I definitely recommend checking out his work and I hope to work with him again in the future.

Below, you can see the various steps of my creative process on this piece:

This was my first effort at drawing Daeny. I did some sketching by hand using my Wacom Intuos4 tablet and added color in Photoshop CS5.5 (Windows) and occasionally using Photoshop CS5.1 (Macintosh). 

My reference for the image was the screen still below from the HBO show. However, after creating the draft pictured above, I decided I didn't like having the horse in the background. Instead, I recreated the scene where she is in the fire and she watches the dragon eggs hatch, seeing her baby dragons for the first time.

I made the background black and began creating the smoke and fire by hand in Photoshop. I didn't want the fire to be completely photo-realistic so I used a combination of line art and color that you'll see in some of my other illustrations as well (notably this one and this one).

Then, it was time to add the dragon. For this part, I reached out to Adam Levermore, a sci-fi illustrator and designer whose work I had admired for quite some time. Adam agreed to create the black-and-white line art for the dragon, based upon some sample ideas I showed him for the positioning of the dragon's body.

Here's Adam's final illustration:

It was time to add the dragon to the fire and begin coloring it in. This piece is still in progress so keep checking back for updates!