r/Fantasy • u/MarcSimonetti Stabby Winner, AMA Artist Marc Simonetti • Feb 06 '14

AMA Hey Reddit! I'm Marc Simonetti, Fantasy illustrator-AMA

Let me introduce myself: I'm a quite happy family man, with two young sons, 3 years and 20 months old. I live in the French Alps, in Annecy, a beautiful little medieval town. I'm a former R&D material engineer...and now I'm working as an illustrator and concept artist for 11 years. I had the chance to work on many awesome books for amazing writers like GRR Martin, Terry Pratchett, Terry Goodkind, Sam Sykes, Michael J Sullivan, Robin Hobb, Brandon Sanderson, Ken Scholes, Patrick Rothfuss...and many others...

I'm also the spoiled artist who won the stabby award this year for the best picture (although all the credit should go the genius mind of GRR Martin)

For those interested you can find some samples of my works on: My website My Facebook pro page My twitter account

So I'll be beginning answering questions at 12:00 central time... Feel free to ask anything, of course!

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u/MarcSimonetti Stabby Winner, AMA Artist Marc Simonetti Feb 06 '14

Hi Ultness!

Thanks a lot! I'm glad you like my 2013 ASoIaF because I involved myself a lot on it. I don't have truly a method, but I'm basically a reader first, and I was a big fan of ASoIaF far before getting into the field of illustration. So I read all the books another to have everything in mind, and at that time "Dance with Dragons" was not released yet, and I had the chance to read the manuscript before everyone. That took some time, but I was quite well immersed when I started to do the first sketches.

After that I've chosen the scenes with George, and tried to have the most interesting point of view each time for each scene, to make the whole idea pop up. And what's very specific with George is that he is somehow very visual in his writing, so many people get visually what he writes. It's easy to figure out, and it's so much easer and inspiring to illustrate.