Westeros: Features - Interview with Tyler Jacobson, 2027 Calendar Artist

July 14, 2026

Interview with Tyler Jacobson, 2027 Calendar Artist

[Editor’s note: Quotations have been lightly edited for concision and clarity.]

Tyler Jacobson, one of the leading illustrators in contemporary fantasy art and illustration, is best known for his work on Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons—including standard covers for major Dungeons & Dragons core books, and a particularly famous piece for Magic: The Gathering that was a D & D crossover featuring Drizzt Do’Urden that sold at auction for $155,000, one of the highest M: TG original art sales on record —he brings more than a decade of experience in both traditional and digital illustration to the project, winning plaudits including recognition such as the prestigious Spectrum and Jack Gaughan awards.

He is now the latest notable artist to get involved in the long-running A Song of Ice and Fire calendar series, joining the likes of Ted Nasmith, Magali Villenueve, Gary Gianni, John Picacio, Sam Hogg, Arantza Sestayo, and many more. I had the pleasure of interviewing him just before he was set to travel to Amsterdam, the host of this year’s MagicCon, to discuss the 2027 A Song of Ice and Fire Calendar which is set to be released on July 21st (you can pre-order here. Not only do we discuss five of the pieces, including an exclusive piece never seen before, but he reveals just a bit about a couple of other of the pieces fans can look forward to.

Daenerys Targaryen with Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion. Art by Tyler Jacobson.

What was the process of you getting involved in this? Is there a rough sense of when they contacted you, and what was the timeline for you to do the work?

Actually, I was contacted several years ago. It was a fairly long process. They’ve been going through the whole print side of things for the last maybe seven months, but it was about a year before that that they started the process. So there’s twelve months, and then there’s a single spread. There’s thirteen individual illustrations that need to be done, along with my other work.

It’s best to kind of spread that out across the year. I spent about a year on it, trying to get about each piece done per month as we went through the process.

So you kind of mix all of your other projects in between? You are getting multiple commissions done, rather than dedicating yourself to one single piece?

Yeah. I mean, I am definitely juggling a lot of jobs at once. That’s just kind of the nature of illustration: you become pretty good at, at least when it comes to your jobs, time management. It’s like a special skill you’ve got to develop.

For this particular project, I decided to kind of treat the whole suite as one. I tried to get together sketches and concepts for all the pieces at once, to hand off to the publishers so they could see the whole project in one view. And once I had sign-off on all those illustrations, I was able to pull forward. But it was a lot of different things to juggle, and a lot of different things to design, so that sketch phase did take a little bit longer.

How familiar were you with A Song of Ice and Fire before this? Did you read it as part of this process?

I was pretty familiar. I mean, I was familiar with the show. I watched all the show, and then it was after I’d seen the show that I started reading the books. It’s always—there’s always that difference, right? Because it’s a different medium, so there’s a different way of telling things: visual storytelling.

There were a lot of moments that visually I was like, “Oh, this is extremely cool. I’d like to depict that,” even though it wasn’t depicted that way in the television show. And that’s fine, because we didn’t want it to look like the television show or any other adaptation. We wanted it to be my vision of what I remember seeing in my head when I was reading the book.

Was it hard occasionally not to have those iconic characters and iconic moments in mind—to think, “I can’t use that; I’m doing something different”?

No, actually. I’m fine with letting those artists that worked on the show do their work and create their vision. I have a lot of fun sort of viewing it through a different lens, I guess is the best way to describe it—or just taking my view on it.

I’m still able to kind of hold the view that I have when I’m reading the books. Even though it was after I’d seen the show, in my head I wasn’t seeing those characters from the show. I was able to kind of hold those separately, and I think I had a lot of fun bringing that to life.

Did they come to you with a list of subjects, or did you have more freedom?

They actually gave me pretty much creative control on that. The only sort of constraint they wanted was that I kind of spread it across all the books that have been published. And so that’s essentially what I did. I picked scenes that I thought were interesting, and I picked character moments that I thought were interesting.

I like to kind of focus on character portraits, so there were a number of those throughout. There are a number of scenes that I thought maybe didn’t exist in other mediums that I wanted to see in my view of what I saw in my head when I was reading the book. I took some fun approaches to a number of scenes that I felt needed a particular look, or an aesthetic, or a design sense. I kind of took the reins on that. And throughout the process, they were all approved.

Beric Dondarrion leading the brotherhood without banners in battle. Art by Tyler Jacobson.

Was there any particular character, feature or location from the text that you found especially interesting—or especially challenging?

The one that initially stuck out, even when the project came to me, was Ramsay Bolton. I really wanted the opportunity to depict Ramsay Bolton in the way that he’s described in the text. I went through a number of iterations of designing, to try and focus the image to what I imagined.

It was probably the first one I started on, and maybe the first one I finished, because I really wanted to depict a particular armor that he’s wearing in the story and in the text. It wasn’t depicted in the show, and I hadn’t seen it depicted much in publishing. I wanted to show this particular scene when he’s at Winterfell. I don’t want to give it away because it hasn’t been released yet, but it’s a very cool suit of armor that I wanted to design.

You mentioned that you have done a lot of Magic: The Gathering. These are small cards, but a calendar is a larger format. How does the size of the final format change how you approach the work?

It’s a different challenge. Magic’s always difficult because you need the image to read at two inches. There are guidelines when it comes to that: the way you build a composition, how strong silhouettes are, the way things need to stand out against the background.

You have a little more freedom when you’re working at a larger size, like a book cover or calendar illustration. You’ve got a lot more freedom to be a bit more subtle, add a little bit more detail, zoom the camera out a little bit more. I’d say on a number of these, I zoomed in close to characters because I wanted to have their portraits. But you get a little more freedom not to focus so heavily on these really strong silhouette moments that you do in Magic. You can be more painterly. It’s a little bit more freeing, I’d say.

The Mountain and the Viper. Art by Tyler Jacobson.

Were these works all done digitally, or did you do any as actual oil paintings?

These are all digital for me, based on my schedule this time around. I had hoped, because it was such a long timeline, that I was going to do some of these in oil. But the year got busy as it went through the project, and I decided that it was better for flexibility to work digitally again. It’s where I’m most comfortable. I wanted to make the best pieces I could, and digital is my most comfortable medium.

I decided to kind of double down on that: I’m going to make these; I’m not going to distract from my quality level by trying to paint them all in the time constraints that I had, and with the number of pieces I was working with. So I doubled down on my agility in digital output.

Your work shows a great deal of attention to armor. Do you use a lot of reference? Do you have props around to help you visualize things?

I do. I own a lot of swords because I’m, like I said, a big nerd about medieval armor and weaponry. I have a lot of swords, and I’ll tend to hold them for things like this. Because I inserted myself in here, sometimes I’ll pose for stuff. I thought, “There’s a bearded knight in the foreground—that could be me at that stage.”

I do occasionally shoot reference. Sometimes I just freestyle it. It depends on how I’m feeling. There’s a certain amount of energy I get when I rely on my initial sketch. I tend to get reference and kind of force it into that initial sketch, as opposed to sticking close to the reference, because I feel like the reference can get a little stiff for me. I tend to rely on my initial drawing a lot more.

Sandor Clegane at death’s door. Art by Tyler Jacobson.

We have an image of Daenerys with all three dragons. Could you talk a little about why you wanted to show this, and how you approached the dragons?

I really loved this one because it kind of shows her off with all three of them. Oftentimes, if you get that, it’s when they’re little babies, early on. This is when they’re more grown and larger. This is the double-page piece. You’ll see a little bit more of the structure, the stairwell that she’s standing on, in the background, and the rest of the white dragon’s face.

I wanted to play around with a number of things: to show the scale of her dragons as they grow, and to show, at least in my head, how I saw her depicted. She has white eyelashes and white eyebrows, and I wanted to get that feeling you see in portraits of princes that are extremely blond. She has white eyelashes and purple eyes. Mostly, I wanted the feeling of how small she is compared to these huge creatures that she’s reared from babies.

The Cersei piece is striking because she is so clearly the center of it, even with so much detail around her.

I wanted to get across that she’s in charge. Joffrey is up here pretending to be the king, so I wanted him to be cropped out. It’s not a bigger image—I wanted that feeling of, like, he’s a footnote to this, like a literal footnote to this pillar of a woman. She’s the power here.

I was embracing the text quite a bit. To me, Game of Thrones feels like late medieval, early Renaissance. He describes slashed clothing so much, and enamelled armors, all of these things that read as the era: the height of armor, the height of clothing. So I kind of pushed into that—slashed shoulders, tunics, that time period, full plate armor. Those kinds of things are what I was embracing with her.

Cersei Lannister before the Iron Throne. Art by Tyler Jacobson.

This next piece is the cover. When you make the calendar, do you decide in advance that something should work as a cover, or do you figure it out later?

We went through all the pieces and thought, “What’s the most exciting one to use for the cover?” This one has the most action and the most grittiness. To me, it also depicts my vision of the armor of the period. When I read the books, I felt like this is actually late, late medieval, getting into the Renaissance: full plate armor.

I wanted to show painted armor. George describes fully enamelled and fully painted suits of armor in the books very well. I had this opportunity to show chipped paint on this character. I also wanted to show the heraldry. It’s not necessarily going to be modern graphic design; it’s going to be more like medieval graphic design. I wanted to kind of double down on those motifs, so you start seeing medieval heraldry quite a bit.

The Red Viper and the Mountain is another fantastic piece. It has a real David-and-Goliath quality to it.

This was another early one that I really wanted to depict. This is an armor thing: I really wanted to depict this painted breastplate. The bright yellow of his house, and the hounds. These are things I felt had a lot more color and a lot more historical quality to them that I really wanted to see.

The Mountain in the show has just all black, and it looks cool—it’s very cinematic—but I like the painted-armor quality that you see in history. I wanted to bring that together here. I still gave him the black armor, but it’s sort of a mood-steel quality throughout it. If you look closely, there are yellows and greens and blues, because it’s sort of heat-treated and then patinaed, like you would see on some battle armor that is all black, which is pretty common in the period.

Do you have a favorite character across the novels?

I do like the Hound quite a bit; he’s a good character. Oberyn Martell is a good character. And then there’s one of Victarion that I really wanted to do. I mentioned it in my list—I was like, “I need to do a painting of this guy,” even if he doesn’t have to be doing anything. When you see the image, he’s just standing on the bow of a ship in the storm, in the wind and the rain. I wanted to depict that character’s stoicism and intensity.

Can we expect prints from this on your site down the road?

Yeah, I believe so. Our goal is that we want people to buy the calendar, right? We want people to find the images when they get the calendar, so we’ll be pretty limited with that until down the road. We want people to enjoy them in the format that we made them for. We want people to have that opportunity to get the calendar, flip through and see all the images.

But down the road, there will be people who say, “I love this piece, and I’d love to kind of have a bigger version of it on my wall,” of course. That will be available for sure.

Video

You can listen below to the more detailed discussion of the five pieces of art discussed above:

Posted at 21:25 CET by Elio
Tags: Tyler Jacobson, Interview, Game of Thrones, Calendar, Artwork, 2027 A Song of Ice and Fire Calendar Interviews | PermaLink

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