Selected art of Bryan Syme

I was originally going to feature Siobhan largely due to excitement about the consistency applied to celtic imagery (including using braids instead of locs).

However I felt this selection of his work showcases how once you get away from the expectation that your female characters must be sexy and wear poorly observed/designed bikinis.

Heroic, sinister, rebellious, elegantly powerful, knife gremlin…

…when you commit first and foremost to character design, the potential is limitless.

After all, you can always have them show some skin (nsfw) under more personal circumstances.

– wincenworks

practice, by Ningbo Jiang

This is one of many “practice” pieces from this artist, and damn! That’s some good frigging practice. ? This reminds me of Evie’s armor from that one Assassin’s Creed game, but less boring to look at from a distance. (Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Evie’s default costume, but to me personally, it only gets Good when you can look at all the stitching detail up close. Is this an unpopular opinion?) 

I love the textures and layering going on, and I highly recommend checking out the full-size image. The thing that drew me to this is the elegant practicality of the design. That triangle of red accents in the center of her really pulls it together. The careful choice of which colors to saturate makes the design cohesive, I think. I just really like it, okay?

-Icy

Warrior Progress, by Muhammad Aiman Zubir

This work may not be finished yet, but it still looks amazing, and I wanted to show it off here. Everything in this design, from the sensible yet feminine hair to the balance of the different materials, works for me. The designs on the armor make me think that this may be a Grey Warden character from Dragon Age, but that’s unconfirmed.

The project page for this has a lot of detail and modeling breakdowns, so I highly recommend checking it out, because there are so many lovely details that are hard to see without the close-ups.

-Icy

Gotta Fix Everyone’s Weird Boob “Armor”

I was frustrated with how Marvel’s Valkyrie was just a sequence of weird design decisions. This particular version ticked me off because they had the cool cuirass with the abs, but then the chafing and the metal boob cones…. ugh.

I started with fixing that chest armor: getting rid of the weird metal bra and adding cool (to me, anyway) shoulder guards. I wanted to give her a more powerful look. I added some small dangling leather straps to mirror those on her belt.

image

When it was time to fix her…. boots? I took the liberty of, at the same time, painting over poor Hel’s painful-looking <biggest air-quotes ever> “armor.” I actually started giving her a more reasonable breastplate but gave up. That would be a project all on its own.

Those leg ropes seemed very stupid to me, and they didn’t go with the rest of the design, so I gave her plate armor that kept the small shapes. I then gave her simple pants to be the large shape in the design. In hindsight, I feel like I should have gone through with the metal gauntlets I wanted to give her but bailed on.

image

Finally, I replaced her Generic Pout™ with a more determined expression. Now both ladies can go forth and fight whoever it is they’re fighting. 

-Icy

khfanforall:

enecola:

@fingersareoptional replied to your post“I’ll be done with my damn term paper later today. So… What armor needs…”

Athena from Smite! All she’s wearing is some kind of dress thing with boob plates stuck to it somehow? Anyways, a goddess of war deserves more.

I don’t know what that tiddy armor is even supposed to protect. I was tempted to fix the amazon armor but honestly that would work better with Artemis than Athena.

I never played Smite so I hope I got it right!

@bikiniarmorbattledamage

We had some technical difficulties with our stream this weekend, fret not! We got a great SMITE goddess redesign right now.

This really is a lovely armor fix that actually uses the original’s shapes and motifs effectively! I like the breastplate and collar in particular. The headgear looks better as well, and I’m so glad her WoW-esque pauldron got shrunk to a reasonable size.

The only change I would make is to either give her a white tabbard or something else under the belt, just to break up the 2 different browns. 

Even though we’ve featured @enecola on the blog before, I will continue to recommend that you check out their blog for more cool redesigns and original character designs~

-Icy