Joshua Gardener's Art Blog

Not alot to say here, (other than i totally changed some the design again, but im totally stable on it now) Im actually really pleased how this whole design came out, even after a ton of alterations i think i finally came to a design i was content with showing. Also since this is usually one of the later things i manage to come up with, i've decided to name her Claire. Nothing too ostentatious but a nice name. If i could change anything it would probably have been to experiment less earlier on when it didnt really add to my design, in the sense that it left me a bit high and dry in terms of time to allocate everything, also i wish i could have put more time into everything as i had an absolute blast doing everything.

Okay so in the end of one of these posts i said that i took away the pauldron because i couldnt make it work, well i put in the time TO make it work, because i really want it in. And thus this is born;  So originally i was going to can the pauldron, until i was staring at some league of legends poster work (some real good stuff there) and was looking at the face of a rocket launcher called 'fishbone' that Jinx uses, and i couldnt help thinking "wow, thats kinda what i want the pauldron to be" and so began my development journey. Using the head as a template i started painting over it to get a feel for the way it worked, and then started going off in my own direction with it, less shark head and more demon mouth. doing so gave me quite a few good ideas, but its only when i dug up some of my older designs from earlier on that i got my final piece.  Originally i created this alien looking thing, using segmented plates, i liked the idea of the demons lo...

When thinking about a promo image (like a wallpaper) I figured the best thing to do was to test the waters with some thumbnails for the composition and posing of the piece, and thus i came up with these. The idea was that i was trying to get in a bunch of different idea's quickly and without worrying too much about anatomy for the moment so that i could focus best on what design captured my characters...character. so to start that off i listed some of the keywords to associate my character with to help me figure out while i was drawing these, and to on reflection look at these designs and pick one out as a winner. Since the character is a paladin of sorts, the stoic attribute means i want something strong and impressive as far as posing goes in order to capture her strength, while wrathful is meant to indicate her somewhat violent nature when angered, so in this case i also wanted her to appear imposing or like she would end you if you crossed her. Lastly she is both holy ...

Somewhat shorter post this time round, as of this point im like most of the way there with the design, some final mashing and sculpting and i should be there. so here i actually just tried mashing two of my favourite designs together and then drawing over the result, it seems to have worked well because i was able to bring out the best of both designs, the bulkiness of the armour, layering on the legs and breastplate etc. additionally i also did a sketch of what the back of the chest piece would look like, since the armour has a big piece of symbolism for the demons they worship, i wanted a relic of the past and have a angel monument on the back with the wings splayed over the arches of the back, so both a bit of sculpting to the user and some lore.  Refining this further by painting more to refine areas of the drawing i've come to what i believe (at the moment) is my final design. I got very inspired by the league of legend poppy redesign and her armour so i wanted...

So Continuing from last time i did my armour work, i had made lot of progress in terms of just producing stuff, but i didnt have a lot of full model views done, so using my mashup as a starting point this time, i did more full sets. Overall i started going heavier, the appeal of this tough ass woman in plate gear was pretty much my fixation here, so theres few areas where any form fitting stuff is (which is pretty annoying in terms of feeling like you're drawing a character correctly) the first two here are mostly just variations on types of design, additions of pieces of armour (on the knees and the thighs mainly) but to mix it up a little i did go for a slimmer design, with a bit of a motif with the neck guard. However i didn't go for it too much as it conflicted with some of the 'Toughness' i wanted to portray, the breastplate was an interesting design though, nice division of lines there. About now i'm slightly starting to feel hesitant in my des...

Although i have a love of armoured characters, i would say i lack a lot of proper knowledge of shapes and how they are incorporated together in traditional armour designs, which i think hampers me when trying to create my own feel for an armour design. While i believe at this stage that i will not necessarily be going for 100% realism in my design, i do want their to be strong fundamentals and a sense of "oh that works" so to start my design i spent a while compositing other armour styles and getting the hang of drawing them, even coming up with some designs based on these mashups. Especially at the start so far this is a daunting task, looking through tons of reference images and pulling bits from both real life and fantasy based armours to find pieces that looked good and meshed together, i found myself drawing endless sketches for bits and pieces of various armour sections trying to capture the right sort of presence for my character. Additionally there was the m...