Your knight Caine looks cool as hell!!! Do you have any further ideas for him? I’d love to hear about your process as well, like, do you just have a love for armor or did you need to do a deep dive for inspiration?? I’m so inspired by Arthurian legends so I’m all about knight AU’s LOL
Please feel free to infodump about your ideas behind it, I’m sure we’d all love to hear about it :DDD
Wowie! Thank you so much! I'm so happy to hear you like the Caine design I made, and thank you for the lovely question!
As for reasoning and process I've always admired the details in armor design. More so in the artistic liberties I've seen of fantasy armor illustrated by other artists. But I haven't really drawn much armor before this Knight Caine piece. It was usually too much of an intimidating subject to draw because I know I can get way too focused into the details while drawing.
I generally do light research for art projects with a certain deadline, but usually when I'm not in a rush I love to deep dive into it. Mostly on historical accurate references so that I can combine them in my own way. Learning as I go about the functionality in armor pieces, looking through historically accurate designs, and learning about the different sets of armor designs outside of western European ones— its all so fascinating to me. Fashion is fascinating to me. And I want to get better at drawing clothes as much as armor.
Now the fun and challenging part was mix and matching the armor pieces to achieve a silhouette that'd be recognizable enough as a pleasant callback to the TADC character designs. That was my main goal and I'm really happy that Caine's seemed to read almost immediately with people.
There was a lot of combinations going on. The helmet's shapes are based on the Burgonet and Armet helmets. They looked most denture shaped to me ahah! The black lines in between the painted teeth are holes by the way, so that when the helmet is closed he can still see out of it. Then cut the helmet in half to make the teeth placement make sense.
Now if there's plumage on those types of helmets its usually feathers, at least from some of the refs I've seen. But to get that Top hat shape in there, I chose to add a more spartan plumage instead.
For the lower faulds and tassets I was looking through the Maximillian, Italian, and Ferdinand plate armors for reference. Also for their snatched waist design for obvious design reasons.
The coat tail cape was a fun touch along with the other artistic liberties I took while looking at references. I know Caine's original design doesn't have epaulets but I wanted to emphasize that Ringleader look and added them to the gold pauldrons. I've seen a lot of fantastic Caine fan art and I just love whenever they add epaulets to his shoulders! I eat it up every time. I even added a bubble and moon in mine.
I practice drawing the pieces separately before putting them on the main figure. I like looking at a ton of references so I can expand my visual mind library before I even sketch things out. Most of all when designing, if it looks cool to me, it tends to stay even after the first draft. Overall I'm really happy with Caine's armor design. It achieved what I wanted it to. I'm sure there could be better combinations out there but it seems I did well according to all the Caine lovers out here.
If i focus too much on the what ifs, I'd never get anything drawn. Haha!
Thank you so much for letting me info dump. The process in art making is probably my favorite part, and the finished piece is usually secondary to my enjoyment. Everything I choose to draw is purposefully put there so it was a real treat getting to share my thought processes.
