HOUSE OF THE DRAGON – SEASON 2 – HBO

SET DEC CONCEPT ARTIST

SET DECORATOR CLAIRE NIA RICHARDS

On House of the Dragon season 2, the directors and show runners wanted to develop a new shaped buck for the dragon saddle, slightly higher in profile; we used this new buck to build 3 new saddles : Moondancer, Silverwing and Sunfyre. bellow are concepts of Moondancer’s and Sunfyre’s saddles with stills from the show.

Prop makes – Craig Narramore and team

leatherwork – Damon Abba

MOONDANCER : Baela’s saddle was briefed as – designed for a confident dragon rider, we riffed from the characters riding costume for some consistency . Developing the black layered scales on the buck nose into the buck neck mail and scale armour, as with all the designs I worked heavily from nature using biomimicry as a key design theme – Mondancer’s in particular was influenced heavily by the forms of beetles like the Pray Mantis and species of Trilobite beetle. Coupled with heavy inspiration from ancient Chinese armour and Samurai helmets, the saddle takes on a slick organic feel webbed to Moondancer’s back.

SUNFYRE : King Aegon’s saddle is the most ornate of all the saddles, it was briefed that it needed to clash with Aegon’s armour, as he would be donning ‘Aegon the Conquerors’ Valyrian armour for the scene. This saddle had some preliminary design from season 1, so I took these elements and went completely over the top to create ornate and embellished show pony of a saddle. The armour is heavily influenced by ornate royal Spanish armour of the 1500s , and baroque style riding saddles, coupled with custom motorcycle engraving. The form of the buck again insect like riffs from the shapes of the Brenthis Daphne crystalis.

Season 2 also saw us make new adjustments to Meley’s Saddle, for the battle between Vhagar and Meleys, Meleys was to loose all luggage in her webbing. I worked closely with Alan Taylor to develop a specific belt attachment for Rhaenys as she straps in for her final under belly attack on Vhagar, the action was seen in detail and so needed to be extremely functional.

As set Dec concept artist, I also helped to design a range of other props, bellow are a few examples of the work developed on season 2.

All designs are property of HBO. All content is shared profit free.