Two Stood Against Many

"Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That's what's important!"  
- Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Scenes depicting a battle of a few brave heroes against a horde of enemies continue to be used in fiction, being drawn to such stories seems to be in human nature. The pathos, sympathy for the underdog, admiration of skill and bravery, all add to the appeal.

Doing such a scene in film is difficult for various reasons, most related to the fact we as viewers recognize certain aspects going against what we perceive as "realistic". 

Film makers get away with some of them - in massive battles there always seems to be a space around the hero, a few metres of air to allow for fancy moves and to give him time to recover while enemies approach one by one.
Still, there are different approaches and layers to such a scene and watching several of my favourites, I thought about them and why they do or don't work.

1) Intent and confidence 

This is such a subtle thing, but fairly important in my opinion. Holywood movies sometimes suffer for this, because stuntmen playing the bad guys are simply much more skilled than the hero played by a famous actor. The years of training and muscle memory show in their movements - the hero supposedly slaughtering multiple enemies with ease has to be carefully photographed from specific angles and helped by frequent cutting between shots, to hide flaws and enhance the way his moves look and feel. At the same time, the baddies move much better and have to visibly restrain themselves to not rush all in at the same time, they have to telegraph their moves to a ridiculous degree etc. They're also very determined to run at the hero and die, no matter how many of their comrades were butchered before their eyes.

Watching Japanese chambara movies recently, I noticed this aspect of them to be rather different. 

Watch this clip of Toshiro Mifune's samurai roles. Mifune being the protagonist is extremely good at being confident, the ultimate badass. He changes between cocky, goofy and serious, but look at the way he moves - low centre of gravity, upright body, look of disgust on his face. Now watch the baddies - lowly gangsters and stoic samurai, they notice their comrades being cut down, they waver, flail their arms and shuffle and fall back in fear. This is how you put many enemies around the hero and not get him swarmed instantly!

2) Movement

Nothing looks more fake than the hero standing in one spot and having the enemies run into his sword one by one. Most successful one-against-many scenes have the protagonist move around a lot. 
- you need to minimize the amount of enemies able to strike you at once. Move to make them get in each other's way, move to a place where they can only reach you one by one etc.
- if you strike them first, you win. This is related to intent - it takes experience and training to get over the fear of being hurt. Most people will not rush in on you. This is a very interesting part of group dynamics and psychology. Watch videos of riots or police training for riots and you'll see what I mean. Or, if you've ever participated in fighting games/sports like SCA, you know what I mean. Even if it's not your real life at stake, you move without thinking - stay closer to a friendly group, don't get surrounded, have someone else to take a hit for you etc.

Warning, this is a very disturbing video of real people getting seriously hurt!!!
(violence starts around the 7th minute)

In this clip, a single man armed with a knife manages to stab several (!!) policemen carrying guns before they take him down. Even trained professionals don't always respond as we'd expect. How does he manage such a thing? It's odd, he just runs from one guy to the next real fast and stabs them. Same way Toshiro Mifune cuts down those gangsters.
In this video a supposed boxer takes on multiple opponents in a street fight. Notice the continuous movement and how he moves them as well, to always keep just one guy in front.

So what are some successful examples of a good use of movement/intent/confidence trinity? 

Conan and the battle of the mounds does it well. Both Conan and Subotai hit and run from incoming enemies and they use the complex battlefield to break line of sight, ambush and avoid getting mobbed.

The landing attack in Troy is also quite good. Brad Pitt is helped by camera angles and shot cuts a LOT though. He's an athletic guy, the choreography is very fine, but some time ago I've seen this fight being shot in a behind-the-scenes video and it looked much less impressive, almost silly. Notice he also moves all the time - running, turning and (famously) jumping.

You can see great emphasis on intent and fighter morale as well as a lot of hero movement in old samurai movies - Hideo Gosha's for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_eddPRh5eY   - Sword of the Beast
http://youtu.be/naZ5toWI2_M?t=1h19m50s  - Three Outlaw samurai

I've been thinking about the ways I could use this in illustrations, because last stand and one-against-many scenes are very common in fantasy art. Perhaps some of the enemies might be visibly wavering, shaken or terrified? It's easy to settle on a very static "none shall pass" pose for the protagonist, because it's simple to build a powerful composition around it. But perhaps I could try something more dynamic with a hero in the middle of a movement?

What are your favourite one-against-many scenes? Got any examples of really bad ones? Share in the comments! :)

Painting a plate

No, I have not become a potter. As the Kickstarter for Guide to Glorantha races towards its end, it keeps raking the money onto a rather huge pile.

Great!

You can check it here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/224590870/the-guide-to-glorantha

I have been painting full page colour plates for it, very much in the style of Angus McBride's plates for the Osprey books.

Each plate depicts a culture-specific event, cultures being represented by four or five characters doing whatever they do and showing off their clothing, jewelry and tattoos.

Jeff Richard and I agreed it'd be good to show how one of these is made, step by step.

Plate n. 4 - Ralios

It all starts with Jeff sending me a brief in PDF. Like this one:

http://pospabr.sweb.cz/BriefPlate04.pdf

I spent one whole afternoon reading these briefs, googling images and going through my image library, looking for reference for each plate.

Examples of such reference may look like this:

I should note that I don't use these images directly, they're not traced, they're not "Photoshopped" into the painting. I simply want to be sure about how this kind of stuff looks so that I can paint it looking plausibly.
This set of reference is for the barbarian bodyguard of course.

After gathering reference I attempt to sketch a composition of the piece. It's important to decide where characters stand, kneel or do whatever they're supposed to be doing. The have to be placed to make sense in the "story" and also to be well visible. That can sometimes be a problem, but here it was quite simple. A tight group of conspirators standing in a dark alley! Very easy.

I draw and paint directly in a program called ArtRage. It produces a nice traditional look and it feels like using real paint too. (ie it's a struggle all the way through :D)

I actually drew this in two layers - one for the architecture (to keep it in perspective) and one for the characters. So if I needed to erase bits of the characters, I could do so without damaging the scene itself.

You can see I've done a bit of the character design in the sketch already. This plate didn't see many changes from sketch to paint, which is a bit unusual for me.

The scene as described in the brief sounds very dark. Dark alley, in the night, no street lights...I was a bit worried about that. I have to get light in there somehow! I suggested we give the sorcerer some kind of magical lantern and it was okayed by Jeff. I quite liked the idea of a night scene with a purplish tint to the dark city (which is pretty common in big modern cities due to air pollution. Not sure how that happened here, but hey. Artistic license, right? ;)) with a contrasting green light illuminating the characters.

You may notice the vertical and upper facing bits of buildings are coloured more towards cold grays, being "lit" by the sky, while the down facing bits are more purply. This would happen on a bright day more likely, where sunlight is bouncing off the ground upwards onto horizontal surfaces. So it's not very realistic to do this at night, but it serves as a nice compositional tool, to get some of the warm colours into shadows. That balances the use of warm hues through the image somewhat.
The bodyguard's face is also the first one I painted. I tend to start with getting faces "right", because they're the most difficult and fun to do.

I did some work on the right side of the painting and noticed the bouncing light issue. I opted for a slightly more realistic depiction and darkened the shadowed area considerably. A lot of work has been put into the stones of the building and the barbarian's costume is mostly done.

I finished the barbarian by detailing the sword, armour and adding runes to his face and arms. I decided the background could use some work, so I painted the buildings in the back. I've done some work on the noblewoman, but almost exclusively her upper half. Somehow the lower bits weren't so appealing to me in this image. I also started on the sorcerer and it was really fun and easy for some reason. The green light was a joy to use too.

This part was a mix of fun - painting the face of the priestess and less fun - painting the lower halves of the sorcerer and the noblewoman. Lots of ornaments everywhere. I also realized the lighting wasn't quite right on the left wall, so I added cast shadows and half shadows, which framed the figures better.

The last step was to paint the priestess, her frilly skirt, tattooed legs and tighten everything else that needed fixing or detailing. I decided to add ornaments to the stonework to the right, including the Harmony rune inside an Earth rune. I thought those two would be a good choice for masons wishing for their building to last. (that wasn't in the brief, just my own initiative after learning the runes by heart :D)

That's it!

My biggest fear:  The architecture. I'm not very confident about buildings, but it ended up being surprisingly alright. Darkness did help for sure though.
My favourite bits: The whole barbarian bodyguard was my favourite from the moment I got the brief. His pipe, his scratched and notched sword, the lamellar vest and (my invention for no reason) the detachable sleeve of his tunic. I also quite enjoyed designing the tall headgear of the high priestess and the mitre helmet of the sorcerer. That one especially! I really enjoy how it shows his painted forehead and how it's using his own hair to attach itself to the head. (look closely, there's a knot of dreadlocks at the top, going through the tiara)

Now what are those heavily embroidered flappy flaps going through the ring belt on the noblewoman? No idea. :) Any suggestions?

Thanks a lot for reading! I hope you'll enjoy the plates when they're all printed in the Guide. I know I will spend a lot of time gazing at them lovingly. ;P

For a Few Sword Myths More

Because my sword related posts seem to be more popular than the rest of my rambling, here's a new one! ;)

Especially popular was my list of sword mistakes artists quite often make, so this is a bit of a sequel to that. Today we'll be talking about one general art issue and two specific fun bits from my favourite movies.

1) Cracked and chipped blades

Ryan A. Span suggested this and I thank him for that - it's a good one. While I couldn't find a good representative example of this issue right now, I'm sure you've all seen this a lot. Maybe you've even drawn this way? I know I used to. ;P

Nicks and cracks are painted or drawn on sword blades to make them look used, as real objects. To make the blades seem less boring and artificial.
I would suggest learning more about how real swords change with use in the hands of a person who cares about his tools, how they're sharpened and polished. (and what else you can do to your drawing of a sword to make the boring parts more interesting)

Nicks will happen even if you're careful, but one usually tries to grind them out if they're small enough. Cracks are not good, you do not use a cracked sword. Scratches happen too and while you could polish them out, they don't really hurt the blade much.
Any reenactor, or a sword enthusiast will tell you one thing - if a sword blade has a crack in it, or a large chunk chipped off, YOU SHOULD NOT USE IT. It is most likely going to break and even if the blade bits don't hurt you while flying off, you'll end up with a broken (useless) sword.

2) Conan the Barbarian - casting of the sword.

(roughly from 1:20)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_OkMan3kkM

(sorry, Blogger won't let me embedd this as a video.)

It's a well known scene - Conan's father makes a sword while Conan and his mother watch. First he casts the iron in a mould cut in a stone block. Then he beats it on an anvil and reheats it a couple of times. (Mysteriously, the engraving on the blade appears before one of these reheats, but we'll not talk about that.)

Can you in fact cast an iron sword?  The answer is complicated, as always with swords.
Yes, you could do it, but it wouldn't be a good sword, if you could use it at all.

Now we see the blade is getting some treatment after the casting, so that would be ok, that would produce a sword like object indeed.

The funny bit is the casting itself.
If we agree that what was used in history was something that was proven possible and useful at the time, we should conclude that casting iron swords is unrealistic.
I'm told that casting certain parts of swords can be done - crosspieces and pommels for example.
The problem with casting iron is the temperature. Iron's melting point ranges from 1200 to 1500 degrees Celsius, depending on the amount of other metals in the alloy.

("WAIT!", I hear you say, "iron is not an alloy!" Well, yes, but a swordmaker would not usually have a chunk of pure iron to work with, nor would he want to. We could call it steel, but that's another can of worms I'm not yet ready to open)

Achieving this kind of temperature for successful casting seems to be rather difficult (for the smiths of old, of course we do cast iron nowadays).

Here's an insteresting discussion on this topic:

http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?p=147825

edit: As pointed out in the discussion - beside the temperature, other problems arise while casting iron swords. Iron swords tend to be longer and thinner - you'd need to achieve such casting technology that you'd avoid bubbles/porosity and other casting artifacts. You would also figure out a way to cast iron so that it doesn't pick up a lot of carbon. 

Bronze for example melts at about 800 degrees Celsius, depending on the tin-to-copper ratio. (copper has a higher melting point than tin)
That is why bronze swords were indeed made by casting into clay moulds.

Smiths have always had a specific status in the society - very similar to shamans and mages. Alchemy itself arose from the practice of smithing. A smith, a metal worker is able to do transmutation - to change one substance into another. To speed up a process which was believed to happen over thousands of years in the vomb of mother Earth - the purification of metals.  (the common belief from antiquity to medieval times was that metals grow in the ground - from low metals like lead into perfect metals like gold)
What else do you call someone who takes a pile of rocks, puts them in a fire, performs a lot of strange actions and transforms these rocks into a shiny sword? He's a magician.

Steel/iron swords are not usually made by casting. (I'm not aware of any instances of that, please correct me if I'm wrong in thinking this.)

Then again, it'd be kinda bogus if Conan's dad taught him the "Riddle of bronze", wouldn't it? ;P

3) 13th Warrior - The Scimitar Grinding

I love the 13th Warrior. It's one of my favourite movies ever. And I love this scene - it's funny, but it also shows Antonio Banderas' character getting some respect from his viking companions.

(from about 1:20)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkTxBCxKg5g

(again, can't embed this video. Sorry!)

Sadly, as with the rest of the film, it's not very historically accurate.

A) He grinds the sword into something resembling a shamshir/scimitar - a curved sword we westerners associate with islamic warriors. BUT, by this time and a few hundred years later - Arabs were using straight swords - very similar to their western counterparts.

The dimensions of the sword were fantastical to begin with, real viking swords of this time were rather smallish.

B) Grinding is a useful technique which has been used in sword making and which is in fact prevalent in sword making today!

But considering the construction of viking swords of that time, grinding it down to this shape would mostly likely ruin the blade and make it near useless as a sword.

Pattern welding (often wrongly called Damascus steel) is a huge topic which could easily take a whole post to explain at least roughly, so here's a link that explains it rather well:

http://www.paul-binns-swords.co.uk/Pattern_welding.htm

If you ground off the hard steel edges, you'd end up cutting with the twisted core. While I'm not sure what the exact result would be, it wouldn't be pretty I think.

That's it for today. If you have any questions, if you think I'm wrong and want me to know - the comments are right below. :)