"The Long Night" Beautiful Death Is as Epic as the Episode That Inspired It

Last week’s Beautiful Death was inspired by a deathless episode, and this week’s was far from that. Artist Robert Ball gives insight into his image inspired by “The Long Night.”

“My brief for this week's Beautiful Death kept changing every ten minutes or so as another character met a sticky end. Then that ending!”

Ball continued, “It was obvious the Night King would be the subject of this week's image, but I couldn't bring myself to ignore the characters we've grown to love over the season.

“I decided straight away that it was all or nothing, and I would show the deaths of all the major characters in one image. It was such a tense, exciting and epic episode that I've tried to convey the feeling by shattering my own image template.

“The Night King's sigil is being stabbed by the Catspaw dagger, and the shards of ice reflect the key moments from the show. It was important for me to show Theon's duality as a Greyjoy and a Stark — I believe in his final moments he was a Stark wolf,” he explained.

“It's the most complex image I've created,” confessed the artist. “And the allusions and metaphors are too numerous to list — suffice it to say there's a lot going on in this image. For the colors I wanted the feeling of the dead of night, cold blues and greens, with white drawing your eye to Catspaw's 'pointy end'.

“It's been a real race-against-time to get this image ready because there's so much going on,” said Ball, who creates each Beautiful Death in only a few days after the episode premieres. “I hope it communicates some of the epic drama of the episode.”