"Yay!". I know right? Another tutorial that makes you wanna run a naked build instead. Absolute rejoice~ ☆
As a friendly reminder, these are all just my personal opinions and approaches, so take everything I say with a grain of salt, in fact take anyone's advice with some tossed foot lettuce. “Art” is purely subjective, you can do whatever you want.
So then, how to paint armor the right way?
You just don't.
There is no right or wrong. Everyone has a different approach for different reasons, and my recommendation for you is to experiment with many different approaches until you can effectively achieve the style and look you have envisioned. Or at least something close to it. And again, your vision does not need to be rooted in reality, or obey any fundamentals- it’s your choice.
While studying masters is essential in my opinion, instead of just copying them, try to get an understanding of what makes certain aspects great, and absorb these little things into your own process.
Also, “success” and popularity don't equal to fundamentally "good" art, and by trying to make your style look like something you're not wholeheartedly into.. well I'm sure you can guess that it's not gonna get you too far; if anything it will make you bitter, frustrated, and keep you from genuinely improving.
Enough philosophy, let's start.
- First, you should decide in what style you want to paint your armor, are you going for a more anime-esque flat rendered look, or are you pushing for something more realistic? If you only have one style, you've already won half the battle.
- Next, be considerate of your materials. Since in this case the armor is primarily metal, decide if you want to make it matte, reflective, or just pure mirror material.
I've made a few quick examples just for this occasion. All except the one at the end of the post are done without reference, and you'll see why.
A tip for actually designing new armor, is to draw such little characters reminiscent of Yoshida's Bravely Default designs, and dress them up in various outfits. It's quick, easy, and leaves you with enough room for innovation and complexity. If something end's up looking decent, just transform it into an actual concept design.
Next up is something more akin to Dark Souls, it's probably what most of you have been looking for. I've painted my fair share of armor, so I have a rough idea of what totally original design I'm going for.
- First lay down the shapes- if you start with line art on a white surface, chances are your figure or object won't have any weight to it afterwards. It's okay if you're drawing anime, but you should probably avoid it if you're going for something more realistic. On a side note, it's also one of the reasons why lolis look so gracefully light in half a ton of heavy armor.
- Next, design the actual armor with lines on top. It's tricky to aesthetically design armor with shapes alone, since you're constantly being busy thinking about the form and planes. You'd probably end up with a decently rendered chunk of iron, but I assume that's not what you want.
- After your design is somewhat set, keep the light source in mind and move to rendering the planes. Since this one is done in grayscale, you can throw some basic coloring on top either with layer modes like “color”, “overlay” or whatever suits you at a given time; or by using hue/saturation sliders.
It's important to always keep an open mind, don't treat your painting as something final, it's transforming since the very first moment, and it will keep transforming until it's good enough.
Now for the last example, this one is done with some metal reference. By now you can probably tell that I have some weird dragoon fetish, so keep sending those spear pics. I've mostly focused on giving it that semi-reflective realistic look, with plenty of warms and cools accompanying it.
The arrows give you a rough idea how metal behaves. A general rule you can follow until you get a grasp of it- highlights are right next to the darkest parts of the form, and the form/surface as a whole features plenty of reflected ambient light which influences the armor's local value and colors. Highlights are placed at the points that are closest to the camera(viewer), the most protruding area of each form if you so will.
The halftone right next to the highlight, should hold the most of the armor's local(original) color. Depending on the specular level of the metal's surface (matte, polished, highly polished), the higher the specularity, the shinier and reflective your armor should look. And lastly there is the Fresnel effect which generally applies to reflective materials. For the lack of a better term, it "sinks" the edge of the form back into the surrounding environment. Think of it as an lost edge, you can easily achieve that by painting over an edge with a big, soft, low opacity brush, while using the color of the surrounding environment. Just be careful not to make the values muddy.
That's it for this one. Silly jokes aside, take it one step at a time, practice diligently, and always stay positive. You’ll make it
Let me know if this tutorial was helpful to you. ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°) or just don’t