I like me some goth characters with perky attitude (that smile is adorable!), and Jen was actually based on the woman who did this miniature’s paint job, but wow is that costume some generic fantasy garbage, scoring some typical bingo points without hitting a single row.
Obviously not the worst we’ve seen, just disappointingly uncreative.
Well, the king is not a very good listener, but at least he allowed the best contest theme ever. Princesses shouldn’t be prizes to be won, but if they have to, let it always be in a “Design a super rad dress I can wear to beat up dragons!” competition.
Thanks to Ros for recommending this to us!
~Ozzie
Throwing back this adorable comic, because it made it wonder: why do artists spend so much time making metal boob cups when they can give their lady characters reasonablechainmail armor and then decorate it with cloth? That would achieve the feminine look they want, right?
So the character I worked with is Cherche, the wyvern rider. You can totally tell that this lady mounts a big scaly monster by the all the protection her legs get against the chafing, right?
And then there’s the very practical bare back.
It’s one of those very frustrating designs which you can tell were referenced from some real armor and had some interesting shape language incorporated, then at some point someone just went “FUCK IT, WE NEED TO SEE SOME SKIN!” and cut out a huge chunk of fabric in a few vital places.
It’s a shame, because while I doubt the practicality of her perforated pauldrons and tassets, they’re very interesting visually and make her costume stand out so much better than the shmexy back and thigh cutouts do.
So, of course, my main goal was to get rid of those holes and make it look like a full set of armor. While the pants demanded only to patch those holes with the color of the fabric, I figured that doing the same for the back would be boooring. So I decided to add a tabard, which would also be a splash of color this grey-navy design so desperately needs. I went for rosy pinkish color similar to her hair and lined with golden detailing based on the design on her axe. I’m quite proud of how it came out.
The shape of the tabard also helped to mask the @eschergirls anatomy and not to make this picture all about her butt.
Smaller, but still relevant change was turning her weird batwing gorget (?) into a full helmet (with grilling similar to that on her shoulders and hips). It’s not supposed to be realistic of fully protective, but counts for something. She, as an axe wielder, should really know that a lacy kerchief won’t protect her cranium from getting split open.
It’s all about what your armor does with kinetic energy. As you may know if you’ve ever played croquet, kinetic energy can transfer through one solid object into another solid object.
In the case of a weapon hitting a breastplate, the red ball is your armor and the green ball is your body, and what you don’t want is a whole hammer worth of kinetic energy transferring through the armor into your body. A good way to prevent this is by making your breastplate convex instead of concave, so that the force can more easily glance off.
Take these two shapes for instance, and humor me in another metaphor. Say you left these two objects out in the rain for a day. What would you come back to? The concave one would have collected almost 100% of the rain that fell on it, while the convex one would still be a little wet but most of the rain would have slid off of its surface onto the ground. Now imagine that the rain is actually a battleaxe or something else heavy-ended. Do you want your armor to collect all the kinetic energy and transfer it to you, or do you want your armor to make sure that most of the kinetic energy slides off, like the rainwater sliding off onto the ground?
A good breastplate will cause blows to slide off to the sides because it is convex, as shown in this breastplate from Witcher 3 that I drew on to emphasize its shape.
Now, compare that to one of the boobplates from Skyrim, which I also drew on to emphasize its shape.
Now, each individual boob is a convex shape, which means that weapons will slide off them, but unlike the big rounded shape of the Witcher 3 breastplate I showed, which makes the weapons and the kinetic energy they bring with them slide off into empty space at Geralt’s sides, the individual boobs of the boobplate create a little valley in the middle of the chest where the weapons will end up. So the boobs on a boobplate deflect blows off the armor…right back into the armor.
Here’s another graphic to help further visualize the problem, wherein the blue arrows represent the incoming weapon and all the kinetic energy it brings with it:
– mod Sallet
tits armor is historical
What you’ve got there is a “heroic cuirass” or “muscle cuirass”, the kind worm by military commanders who wouldn’t normally see combat on the front line. It’s just for show, not meant to be a significant means of protection.
I’d like to add that not only is there no evidence of the heroic cuirass ever actually being used in battle – but they are an artifact from an era when the mightiest weapon one might by expect to be struck with was a heavy spear with a bronze tip, being wielded one handed. (That’s why it’s got that green discoloration, it’s literally from the Bronze Age, ie before they had iron or steel).
Once steel and stirrups were introduced, the impact that one could experience on the battlefield rose dramatically, because the amount of force a guy on a horse with a steel tipped lance could inflict was dramatically greater than a soldier with a spear in one hand and a shield in the other could ever even hope to inflict on their best day.
So steel armor, became the standard to protect against the guys on the horseback and so soldiers had to start carrying weapons that could hurt people in steel armor (maces, war picks, polearms, etc).
Hence the convex shape and design elements to prevent blows being deflected into bad places became a bigger and bigger focus.
It’s almost like weapons and armor have evolved over time because ancient civilizations didn’t have access to all the knowledge and science we do today…
An excellent positive example of fantasy armor that is both lavish and regal, yet functional, battle hardened and just positively badass. Bonus points for the artist giving her a great looking battle scar.
The turnaround above gives a good view of the armor overall, but I highly recommend visiting the ArtStation page linked above to get a more in depth look. The artist has put so much beautiful and astonishing detail, it boggles the mind.
It’s almost criminal that this hasn’t gotten more attention; I would love to see this in a game.
This is a bit too over-designed for my taste, but I definitely agree that this is a design more likely to be given to a man character.
And her scar is pretty nice! Definitely check this piece out on Artstation for detail shows and workflow breakdowns, if you’re into that kind of thing.
I saw this magazine in tesco and stared at it for a good minute just going ??? This is the cover image they chose for a magazine about the *essential* things for fantasy artists to learn, and doesn’t that just say it all?
We featured this magazine on the blog before, but it never got bingo’ed! Now that’s been rectified.
This design honestly looks like when you’re drawing the figure to figure out pose and what not, and end up putting way too much detail into it that you like. And then you feel bad for having to put clothes on top of your hard work, so you just kinda… stick some liquid metal to the essential areas, add some small decorative pieces, and call it good.
