This piece began as an idea for one of gameartisans’ sketch challenges, with the theme being historic deaths. I’d been on a cowboy kick recently and so I chose the Alamo, and specifically Davy Crockett’s death, as my subject. The history behind the fall of the Alamo is rich in detail, and I subsequently lost hours doing research into Texian (what the inhabitants of Texas then called themselves, feeling they were neither Mexican nor American) life, and the different people involved in the battle. To tweak things a little bit I decided to turn Davy Crockett into a Raccoon version of himself, in homage to his famous coonskin hat.
Davy is holding a flintlock “Kentucky” rifle, which I based on replicas made by Caywood guns. The man behind him is just a random Texian, but he’s very loosely based on James Bowie, who also died in the Alamo. By very loosely I mean I considered making that character actually BE James Bowie but decided that I didn’t want to bother with doing too much more research and being bogged down in making sure the character feels historically accurate. So I made him a random Texian and gave him two Kentucky flintlock pistols to match Davy’s rifle. I’d actually thought that they ought to be revolvers since in my mind the Wild West and the Alamo go hand in hand, but apparently the revolver only started becoming really popular a few years after the fall of the Alamo.
Here’s a couple of sketches I made before I started work on the final piece.
Raccoon Sketches
Texian Sketches
Layout Sketches
