Loyalist Portrait Series

[Turuk]

Regards the bowman, I can't see the bow string below the hand at all. Great work all throughout though.

This is intentional I believe, as the bowstring is supposed to be going between his left arm and body.

[LordBob]

I did notice something with his hand. The problem, I think, is that in respect to the position of both his arms and the bow, he cannot be holding the string.
Imagine instead that he's in the middle of inserting the arrow and his hand is slightly off to the right of the bow. I'll try and make this alternative more obvious, but it's a tricky angle

By "almost done", I mean that his tunic is too clean for my taste and the linewor's still black.


EDIT : final Woodsman with slightly larger eyes and a better right arm

[woodmouse]

Hmmm, is it just me or does the right arm look like... hmm... again, my "drawn-in-a-second-picture" to show what I mean.
If it's meant to be like that, I love it. It just looks a little flat and long in my opinion.

[Sgt. Groovy]

OK, I tried that pose in practice and there were two things I noticed:

1. When reaching behind the back, it's natural for the elbow to go back. This causes froreshortening to the upper arm. The lower arm stays pretty much parallel to the canvas, and therefore doesn't look foreshortened.
2. Also, the shoulder goes up and this will also cause the opposite shoulder to go down a bit, creating a bend in the whole body.

[kitty]

the chainmail and pauldrons on the bowman are really nice! (feel like writing a chinmail tutorial?)
but i think his head is too big in relation to his body, there are a bit more than one and a half heads between chin and beltline whereas i'd expect about two, scaling the head down a tad should fix that. (and the eyes are slightly different sized and don't line up)

keep it up!

[Sgt. Groovy]

I personally don't find that chainmail terribly convincing. To be flexible, chainmail must be made of interlocking rings. If a wire mesh like that was flexible enough to wear, it would also be so thin as to not offer any protection.

[kitty]

yep, chainmail consists of interlocking rings, hairdos of single hairs and cloth of lots of fibres.... we don't need to show every single pore to paint convincing skin.

i like what lordbob does with the chainmail because it is a convincing simplification. many of the ways to render chainmail i have seen on these forums (including most of my own) look very technical, smell of vector and essentially clash with the rest of the painterly rendering style. bob took the circles as a base, painted over them sporadicly, added a few little highlights (and will presumably add another shadowlayer) and thus evokes the resemblance of chainmail.
it doesn't look like wire mesh to me in this context at all and a few little shadow dots symolizing on ring overshadowing the one underneath in a few places could fix that easily altogether.

[Sgt. Groovy]

I'll be first to admit that chainmail is a real pain to render well. I'm probably more critical than most people about it because I've studied the issue quite a lot myself.

Another problem with LordBob's rendering is that it looks fairly thin. Chainmail is quite thick, and the thickness creates a specific feel to it. The thickness also causes the visible pattern to change quite a lot depending on the viewing angle. Here's a nice reference, it's a chainmail coif seen from almost the same angle.

[LordBob]

Groovy's picture works fine for the woodsman's arm and the fix is rather easy, so I'll come up with a new version.

As to the chainmail, I'm at a loss. I did use reference, and the size of my rings isn't so different from those on both links, but I reckon the result does look light as far as protection goes. It might have to do with the thickness of the "mesh" : I did use a custom "set-of-rings" brush, so I was a little suprised when it came out as some kind of wire mesh. Probably caused by further strokes when shading the mail.

Altogether, I'm happy with the chainmail as it is now : I'll try a start-over, but I'm not promising not to keep my first attempt in the end.

[Neoskel]

If i remember right, isn't TSI the resident chainmail expert? You could ask him for some pointers.

[thespaceinvader]

Nah, I got the technique from kitty, with inspiration from bob. My method isn't that good on areas with other colours showing through underneath.

[Sgt. Groovy]

One way to get some depth to the chainmail would be a two-layer approach: lower layer would would be darker and have holes in it, representing the deeper parts of the mail , and the upper layer would represent only the parts extending furter out and providing the specular highlights. The upper layer would consist of dots and its overall coverage (the dot size and density) would depend on the viewing angle and local specular intensity. You'd have to apply the same deformation to both layers (for example a displacement map) but providing a little bit of offset changes would increase the sense of depth.

[LordBob]

Tried a new approch for the chainmail, based on Groovy's latest post :
- Dark base layer (the leather beneath)
- Medium grey layer, with lines that create the main pattern of the mail
- Light grey layer, with high contrast-brush strokes that create the reflection of light on the rings themselves.

The result isn't bad either, but I think it could be improved by adding some randomness in the size and intensity of some of the highlights, and possibly adjusting the angle of the strokes in some places

The rest of the bowman is pretty much over.
Will post a finished woodsman soon

[Sapient]

while this version of the chainmail may be more realistic, the effect reminds me too much of beads and I prefer the previous version. still, it's very nice even though I don't prefer it.

[Jetrel]

Prefer the second chainmail as "chainmail", although the first is fairly good-looking, too, and might be a useful technique for something down the road.