Gawain and the Green Knight - Character design notes
This is a compilation of the character design notes I wrote for the first Kickstarter of the illustrated edition of “Gawain and the Green Knight” adapted by Patrick Stuart, which did not reach its goal. However there is a new one, which seems to be working better. I hope you find it interesting.
Gawain is King Arthur's nephew, so decided to portray him as a young, beardless man, unlike the other male characters. In part this is to emphasize his youth and also to make the contrast with Lord Bertilak greater. As Patrick points out in the book’s afterword:
Gawain is feminised and Bertilak masculinised, a LOT. Gawain’s beauty is gone on about quite a bit, when he arrives in Bertilaks hall he is dressed in skirts and described (I think) as like a fower. Bertilak and the Green Knight are both described as super-masculine with specifcally well-shaped limbs (especially thighs), narrow waists and muscular trunks.
Gawain’s physical appearance was originally inspired on the likeness of the model of an perfume's ad campaign, although it changed over time.
On the book Gawain has two different sets of clothing: his courtly attire, which he wears while in King Arthur's and Lord Bertilak''s castles and his armor.
The courtly attire is a simplified version of the kind of clothing that appears in contemporary Late Medieval art and more recent representations, like the one above by Alphonse Mucha. The lack of ornaments suits Gawain’s humble nature, and made it easier to draw too!
The design of his armor was initially influenced by a very useful sketch from a Pace University website, as well as 19th century illustrations of 14th century armor. Like Arthurian legends themselves, Gawain's armor is anachronistic, but its based on the kind that was used in the same period in which the poem was written.
The Green Knight is complex character, in his afterword Patrick gives him thirteen possible meanings and his motivations are hard to figure out, even when they are revealed at the end of the poem.
He is described both as handsome and terrifying, almost half-giant. Next to him even a heroic character like King Arthur looks like a child. I based his face and physical build on the Farnese Hercules, although with a wilder beard and hair. He is always barefoot, which I found quite fitting since he is a representation, among other things, of Nature.
Before drawing my version, I looked at several previous ones. I find it curious that in the miniatures of the original poem, his face isn’t green. However a common thing to them is that they simplify the very detailed description the poem gives. The sketch from the Pace University website shows the profuse ornamentation of the horse and the axe, which are described in the stanzas 9 and 10 respectively.
A minor detail that came late in the development process was to give to the Green Knight and Lord Bertilak the same belt. I believe it worked out well, without being too obvious.
I originally wanted to give her the face of the actress Brigitte Helm, but after several changes on her features, like her jaw width or the position of her eyes, the likeness became much less evident.
Like Gawain and the Green Knight, Lady Bertilak has two different sets of clothes. The main one is a blue dress with an escoffion, a headwear popular during the Late Middle Ages, contemporary to the writing of the poem. The other ladies of her court dress in blue too, because any other set of colors drew unnecessary attention in the two illustrations where they appear.
Her other set of clothes is the one she wears when she offers Gawain the green girdle. It is inspired by her original appearance in the miniatures of the surviving manuscript, specially her headwear with pearls.
For the design of her mantle I used the megalithic engravings of Newgrange, Ireland which I had first intended to draw as tattoos on the eoten back in the stanza 31, but I ended discarding because they were barely visible. I also used patterns taken from the pre-Hispanic archaeological site of the Painted Cave of Gáldar, in Gran Canaria, the island where I am from.
