So, recently League of Legends decided to release this origin story for Lux, which has really helped showcase how terrible her design is in comparison to that of… well the rest of her culture.  Right off the cover makes it look like she’s the princess to be rescued, not the heroine to reach her potential. 

The best thing that can be said about this comic is that they’re depicting her within the society she supposedly came from: it’s now well illustrated how tacky and impeding that shitty boobplate would be.

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If it wasn’t for the title, you’d assume this was actually a story where Garen was the hero for baby sitting a generic damsel in distress… Which is kind of horrifying when you realize Lux has been in the game for eight years, and somehow fixing her design or evolving her default into something better has never occurred to the folks in charge. 

– wincenworks 

The design process for this definitely not sexualized, because not skimpy (?) “armor”: 

  1. Draw a naked chick, make sure her (obviously nipple-less) breasts have an amazingly implausible shape.
  2. Add the tiniest hint of texture (and little to no volume) on parts that you think might need to pass as armored (hence the boobplate).
  3. Loincloth/buttflap for modesty.
  4. Literally everything else: fill in with non-flesh colors!
  5. Profit?????

~Ozzie 

Leveling up with Angela

Trying to recapture lightning in the bottle that was my original Angela redesign, I decided to have a take on her upgraded armor… And it was beyond me, really. 

This thing was so bad to begin with that it should have been remade from scratch, not by modifying the unsalvagable original. I did my best, though.


Before doing anything to the costume, though, I had to take care of the ABSOLUTE GARBAGE color composition on this whole splash page. What genius thought that orange background was optimal way to present a character with big orange hair and even bigger orange wings? 
Fixing it required all the sophistication of the easiest color theory trick in the book – I recolored the background. Wow, amazing! What do you mean orange pops out from blue better than from more orange? What even is complimentary colors? 

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Only then I could start working on the armor itself. Boobplate proved to be much less inspiring than Angela’s normal golden bikini top, as the shape language and colors in the original gave me much more to work of off. This I could only change into actual, rather boring, breastplate. 

I had no idea what was happening to the leg region, so to cover the nonsensical crotch area and to give the design some consistency with my previous one, I recreated the mail tabard (just in gold this time) and gave her an updated version of the belt I was so proud of the last time. This time not only I let her keep the butt cape, I made it bigger and recolored it to light red, for another splash of color. and also to recreate the look her gambeson tassets.

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The lesser changes include: fixing the giraffe neck, getting rid of the 90s comic hair (which also seemed to be clipping into her wings?), making her headpiece bigger and connected in the middle, giving her a bit smaller wedge heels and stockier built. 

I’m afraid this really isn’t half as good as my previous Angela redo, but I hope you guys like it anyway!

~Ozzie  

In relation to an Overwatch League event two new exclusive skins were released, and one of them is an off-brand Camilla from Fire Emblem… I mean generic JRPG waifu… I mean Atlantic Mercy >_> CREATIVITY

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Unlike Camilla’s, her boobs might be all covered, but the shape and color contrast of the chest piece make sure that our attention goes to them first! 

So, how is your “doing women better” going, Blizzard? 

For those curious, here’s what the last season’s All-Star skins looked like: 

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Of course Tracer’s Atlantic costume wasn’t designed all around her tiddies (we know she’s all about that ass)… So, what’s that thong-resembling golden bar for, exactly? ( ͠° ͟ʖ ͡°)

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And even then, the weird butt ornamentation wasn’t as egregious as the boobplate on wannabe Camilla… 

Also, both the Pacific skins should prooobably reconsider the appropriation of vaguely native Pacific Islander imagery

~Ozzie 

h/t: @amozzarellastick

PS: I discourage looking up fanart of Atlantic Mercy without safe search on, at the very least not while in public. 

PPS: A pic I found on a fan forum, very reminiscent of this parody we posted three years ago

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De-failing League of Angels Part 1: Stabby leather lingerie

Apparently we felt like taking a challenge the day we made those edits, because, well, it’s League of Angels, the epitome of creative bankruptcy in video game marketing


What I decided to redesign was this extra-stabby leather… um… outfit that I bingo’d before

After the initial shock of how uncomfortable that “armor” must be, the literally biggest thing that caught my attention in this artwork were her thighs. HOW FREAKING HUGE ARE THEY IN PROPORTION TO THE REST OF THE BODY? Unfortunately this seemed mostly like an epic fail at foreshortening rather than an attempt at ‘thicc’ fetish, let alone at earnest fat representation… So I decided to reverse that. 

Instead of shrinking the thighs to give her conventionally attractive model proportions, I readjusted the rest of the body to fit them, resulting in a chubbier figure.

Her arms now have some heft and her head isn’t tiny anymore.
Though most important changes went into the torso, which now has a human-sized waist and connects to other body parts at humanly possible angles, instead of those of a Tetris puzzle. 

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I am very satisfied with what I managed to do with that shameless boobplate. The idea was to still have it be a breast-oriented armor without making it look like two coconut halves with extra-emphasis on cleavage, and while retaining as much of the original’s decorative aesthetic. Basically a more sophisticated attempt at what I did with Regime Wonder Woman waaay back

I also slightly reshaped the stabby laced leather part under it, because it looked cool enough… just not on bare skin. Speaking of which, of course there was no way I left this poor woman with no padding, so in place of all this pale skin I painted white gambeson, retaining the original color scheme. She also now has full leather pants, because why wouldn’t she? 

All in all, I think I managed to improve this image significantly. Not all edits are seamless, but I’m quite proud of the way they came out. How do you guys like it? 

~Ozzie 

Simplifying the Diablo Ladies, Part 2 

Demon Hunter from Diablo 3 was… a challenge, to say the least. Mainly because I couldn’t decide where to even start with that ridiculousness!
Not only is she super sexualized via the enforced “feminine” silhouette of skin-tight armor, boobplate and giant thigh gap, including a cameltoe… she’s also the most overdesigned thing I ever tried my Photoshop skill on. 

Apparently to work as an artist at Blizzard, you have to willfully forget the most basic rule any design school worth its salt teaches: Less is more
For concept art of what would ultimately be a small character model in-game, all those pieces have SO. MUCH. NEEDLESS. DETAIL! Teeny tiny little shapes of distracting ornamentation, basically nothing to rest your eye upon. 

I feel really sorry for anyone who ever attempted cosplaying this shitshow – so much work added into recreating all those arbitrary seams, textures and spikes, sheesh. 

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I was so busy simplifying the shape language that I overlooked some stuff I do pretty routinely, like getting rid of the cleavage in the first and second levels, and modifying the hourglass silhouette (I did add some bulk in higher levels, just not much). 

Preparation for posting this redesign is why I threw back this post lately (also, you know, it’s just a good post to resurface) – because those level ups convey neither a better set of armor, nor more protective layers, except for pauldrons. The shape of her boobs and thin waist remain a constant, no matter how much more “armored up” she’s supposed to be.

Like with Ashe before, I decided that my version is a trans lady, with a noticeable crotch bulge

in the place of the creepy thigh gap. Though I discarded my initial gag related to its size, as it was just in poor taste and not my joke to make. 

Overall, this thing took two or three weeks to finish (last level seemed unsalvagable at first), but hopefully I managed to put some actual design thought into this hot mess.

~Ozzie

Since one of our latest stream redesigns was of some Dark Sword miniatures (including the return of butt-window lizard lady), we considered a couple more characters to fix, including this here Jen – Harvester of Souls, lady necromancer with serious boobplate problem. 

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.

~Ozzie

falconlord5:

Would you mind going into further detail on the convex shape of breastplates versus the concave shape of the ‘boob plate’? Please and thank you.

whiteraven13:

its-spelled-maille:

burning-skull:

its-spelled-maille:

Certainly. 

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.

– mod Sallet

@bikiniarmorbattledamage

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…

– wincenworks

followthespottedhyena:

we-are-blacksmith:

we-are-viking:

iamstroodle:

balamist:

that friend is vestal

I appreciate this immensly

@we-are-knight @weareladyknight

…… I mean… Maybe?

@bikiniarmorbattledamage

I think that a couple other characters from the parodies we posted over the years would gladly patronize this blacksmith as well 😉 
Consider: Lyla from the College Humor sketch, the angry Dorkly comic lady, this poor heroine, the Chainmail Bikini Squad, Princess Adrienne… Oh yeah, there’s also this poor dude from Oglaf strip which we never knew how to address on BABD.

What I’m saying is, bad blacksmiths/armor merchants are kind of an recurring subject in bikini armor satire. And it’s nice for once to see one who’s fixing sexist armors instead of perpetuating them 😉

PS: This is what Arbalest and Vestal’s boobplates look like in the original artwork of Darkest Dungeon

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~Ozzie

Not all heroes wear capes.

-Icy

So, I was looking at the recent comics issued and I found there’s this new series that seems to feature a lovingly rendered horse… and what’s probably one of the most ridiculous outfits that’s ever been designed.

Yes… she has a steel undies on outside of her painted on pants… apparently.

– wincenworks