Substrata: The Max Thread

This is the thread where I'll be posting the things I'm submitting to the Substrata project.  Feel free to comment and tell me all your hopes and dreams for my work.

Here are some armor studies I put together tonight.  I haven't decided what kind of world I think Substrata is, so in addition to some regular fantasy armor I threw together some post-apocalyptic street sign armor.  But with a spanish stopsign, because why not?

Hey Max,

Good start here. Just to echo what was said at the meet up.

I'd love to see you explore the whole figure. Also working looser, and experimenting with silhouettes I think will give you a broader range of concepts to choose from.

I know this was just jump start art, to see where you wanted to go with this. But I thought it would still be good to post the feed back.

Thanks Jason, that was good feedback.  Even though these were essentially warmup drawings, I'm going to go ahead with the process for the practice.  Silhouette exploration via thumbnail is something I do only sporadically, because my habit is to approach recreational drawing as a doodle that just gets more and more detail as I go.  I took the guy with the asymmetrical horn as a jump off point and started throwing down some silhouettes last night, I think some of these are already stronger than the original, I'd be curious to hear which ones the group prefers.  I've numbered them all so it will make them easier to discuss:

Something I noticed was that the first few were pretty similar to the original bust that I drew, but after about 5 or 6, they started to diverge pretty wildly.  Sometimes that was to the good, sometimes not so much (that final one is pretty weak in my opinion).  You'll notice that the Botas Mutantes started to appear after awhile, I'm pretty sure somebody is going to be rocking those in at least one of my submissions...

Also, shout out to Seung for the excellent red pencil.

I really like the asymmetry of the first design. Also I was drawn to the last one as well. I like the Arabian dress, mixed with various tiles. Just my two cents, nice stuff.

I've decided to move on #5 in the silhouette exploration image, it is the one that keeps pulling my eye to it the most. I've blown it up in photoshop (I set up an 11" X 8.5" file at 600dpi), and I'm going to tighten up. I've started looking for reference, and I've found some pretty cool suits of armor from the German High Gothic period that feel like they have some details I can borrow. There is a TON of fantasy and modern reproduction armor that turns up on a google image search, and at this point I prefer to look at actual armor made in antiquity to see what those folks were doing.
This is a very popular armor that seems to be casting a pretty long shadow over the modern reproduction scene. I like what is going on with the helmet, and in particular the asymmetrical Gardbrace:


I don't know much about the provenance of this suit, but I really like what is going on with the back of the helmet where it blends back into the rear of the suit:


The back of this armor is pretty cool:


I had better luck searching for "Invalides Armor." Invalides is the military museum attached to Napoleon Bonaparte's tomb in Paris, and I know they have an exceptional collection of arms and armor because I went there some years ago. Here are some standouts that turned up on that search:

this is actually the child armor of one of the kings of England, possibly one of the Edwards? I can't recall, but the etching details are amazing:

Those armor shots are great! The detail on the child armor is beyond impressive.

I'm looking at the thumbnail you liked, number five, and it doesn't seem to me like it would cinch in the middle as much as these armor tend to. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the thumbnail? When I looked at it initially, my mind when to more Samurai-like armor.

Excited to see more!

Man, awesome reference, and I think your thumbnails are a great improvement.

To follow up on Jaclyn's comment about the torso area, I'm looking forward to how you might resolve that. When I first saw it, it struck me as feeling like a Mongolian type of warrior.

Looking forward to seeing this progress.

I'm thinking of resolving the torso area with some kind of Kilt situation. In general, I was having a difficult time adapting the reference I liked to the silhouette I liked, so I'll need to sit down and decide what to do with both. Samurai armor is probably the next stop on the reference train.

I love Samurai armor, can't wait to see how this progresses!

This is a great pose in samurai armor:


It turns out Korean armor looks quite a bit like what I want from this silhouette with the sloped shoulders and raised collar (I suspect this suit is from a movie):

more korean armor:

Here is an early step in my cleanup process.  I've dragged the two new reference images I'm using to get the basic armor components and shapes down, and I've enlarged the silhouette I want to use.  I sketched a rough figure in there on a layer in blue so I can keep track of what the body underneath that armor is doing, and I have a layer with black lines cleaning up the armor shapes.


I haven't been able to find the back of that korean armor suit, so I am using my best judgement to infer what is happening back there.

started fiddling with some tone, it feels pretty rough still:

Solid progress. How close are you going to stick to the Korean armor? The Korean armor, by the way is pretty awesome, it feels like a blend of Medieval and Samurai armor.

I'm not sure, I don't think I'll keep all the details because I liked the asymmetrical filigree in my original drawing. I'm already looking to that samurai armor to inform the arms and legs since the Korean armor is just a torso. I'd like to get a nice solid grayscale image with no outlines, then start to play around with some of the scavenged material elements for parts of it.

So it turns out Tire Armor is a thing:

This is cool. Search Tire sculpture, there was some stuff floating around last year that was pretty amazing.

https://www.google.com/search?q=tire+sculpture&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=cIXRUbz7M4W68wSTwoGgDg&sqi=2&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=931&bih=640#imgdii=_

Also this
https://www.google.com/search?q=junk+yard+art&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=RoXRUb3CK4m-9gTGzYGgDg&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=931&bih=640#tbm=isch&sa=1&q=scrap+metal+sculpture&oq=scrap+metal+sculpture&gs_l=img.3..0l4j0i5j0i24l4.13331.14160.5.14445.5.5.0.0.0.0.87.294.5.5.0...0.0.0..1c.1.17.img.e2W1rFxYj0Q&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.48572450,d.eWU&fp=88cd69c72bdd87c6&biw=931&bih=640
This is where I am going to pull my armor influence from...maybe.

Wow this is actually a pretty cool idea overlaying the sketches onto the silhouette thumbs. I actually enjoyed the number 6 as one of the more interesting shapes of the bunch. I think it'd be cool to see it explored a bit. It kind of feels like a character that would just be built interestingly.

admin note-I moved this thread into the "bosses" subforum since it had grown beyond the initial intent of exploring armor details and now feels more like a character thread.

Cool, now that he is a Boss character do you think it changes how you might approach him?

Does he become a larger character or would your boss fight with him be based on overcoming his advanced skill set?

I almost want to take this guy back to pencils and noodle out some details.  I'm having a hard time progressing on that behind the back image, so I might do a turnaround and figure out all the details now that I have an idea of his basic shape.  I started making overlay layers of the various bits of armor so that his kilt was made of shredded tires and some of the collar bits were diamond plate and stopsigns, but I don't feel like the grayscale armor is coming out like I want it to.  I moved him to bosses because the armor feels too sinister for a player character.  

Given that it's samurai style armor, he strikes me as a guy that would be fast and aggressive more than large.

Yeah, that armor totally works for that silhouette! If I see any back views of Korean armor suits, I'll be sure to post them. Lookin' good so far.