My MA thesis is finished!

No funny title today.

I'm currently trying to finish my MA Computer Graphics studies and after months of struggle, I managed to wrangle my thesis into existence.

The topic is "Digital Reconstruction of Archaeological Finds" and here's the abstract:

This thesis defines archaeological reconstruction and describes its history
and evolution. It explores the use of computers in reconstruction and lists
currently used techniques and methods. Romanian archaeology and a brief
historical summary of the ancient Dacian people are discussed with Romanian
archaeologists. The practical part presents the results of attempted reconstructions
of Dacian archaeological finds supplied by Romanian archaeologists.
Various freely available applications suitable for reconstruction were
tested and their performance compared. The thesis also suggests possible
course of further research and development of digital reconstruction.

I know, it's so DRY and boring.
You can download the whole text (with pictures too!) here: http://pospabr.sweb.cz/dpJanPospisil.pdf

Anyway, as part of the thesis I also did a painting.

It shows a family of Comati (or Komatai), ancient Dacian commoners. If you want to know more, check out the link above. :)

3 points on pauldrons in fantasy illustration

I'm sorry about the unimaginative title!

My armour posts seem to be among the most popular ones and I just got an idea for another one today.

Pauldrons are difficult, I won't lie. Armour in general is very hard to understand and to draw. And an illustrator usually needs to come up with acceptable yet innovative designs on a regular basis.

I won't even talk about massive Warhammer marine/Warcraft pauldrons, or pauldrons with giant spikes, those are a bit obvious and I'll leave them for an even less inspired post in the future.

There are three things I want to address. Let's look at the amazing drawing I put together five minutes ago:

(click to enlarge if you wish)

1) Single pauldrons held by body straps

This is all for the sake of coolness and asymetrical design. Single pieces of pair equipment probably were used here and there, but more because of the lack of the other piece rather than any deliberate purpose. It's also much easier to strap and set up a pair of pauldrons. As we've no doubt seen many times, these pauldrons are magically held on the body by (often really crazy) webs of straps and belts. Often they'd make it very difficult for the person to move.

Everytime I see this, I have to question the sanity of people who'd choose to wear only pauldrons and no other armour, for whatever reason. Is it ideology or bravery like with the berserks? Well then a pauldron is just as armour as any other piece.
Is he supposed to be a "light" build? Some kind of a rogue? Why on earth a pauldron then? It's not like the shoulder is the first place anyone would attack, or a bodypart one needs to protect above all others. I'd wear a cuirass, or a padded jack in that case.

To me this is the equivalent of a chainmail bikini - a dinosaur of fantasy illustration we should forget.

2) Pauldrons on hinges

I wonder who came up with the idea. Some unfortunately placed rivets on an original armour might have deceived him. Or maybe he just thought this was how it worked.

Pauldrons are not riveted to the cuirass. No.

Still, fantasy armours repeat this design over and over.
You even see it in movies (and boy oh boy, does it show how uncomfortable and awkward it is!)
 - I'm looking at you, Dungeon Siege!

also games like Dragon Age:

And man, does it NOT work when you make it into a costume!

(that poor actor had to pretend he could lift his arms comfortably)

So how were these things attached to the person? They were usually tied onto the cuirass/gorget/padded jack at the shoulder/neck. No, it doesn't flop around wildly, you can always put a strap going under the arm to hold it in place.
Putting the weight on the shoulder is a good for mass distribution and it doesn't get in the way of any movement.

3) Pauldrons wide enough to make you stuck in the door

Pauldrons are not just any massive bowls you stick on your shoulders. There are many different types and shapes, all very specifically shaped to fit the body very tightly and closely. You want to be a small target, not a huge one. You don't want it to change your balance.

I get it, wide shoulders make the silhouette seem powerful. I beg you, do it with the actual shoulders and then put pauldrons on those, don't put massively wide protruding pauldrons on narrow shoulders.

Illustrations like that remind me of American "football" players stuck in that harness of theirs. They have padded shoulders, because they want to tackle people.

There's no shortage of large "shoulder pads" in historical armours, but they're designed in a way that makes them cover a large area while remaining fairly close fitting:

I've posted mainly medieval plate armour as examples of how it "should" look. For a good reason - most fantasy is still based on our limited view and understanding of medieval Europe. Sure, it's changing, we're adding Asian and other influences. But the majority of knights, paladins and other armoured characters still wear "knight armor".

We could speak about more "primitive" shapes and designs like the tube-and-yoke armour, or the lorica segmentata. But we won't, not today. :)

I'd like to stress this is not a hate post, meant to tell all illustrators how dumb they are. Far from it!
The portrayal of fantasy armour IS getting better and better all the time.

These are just my personal pet peeves with pauldrons, that's all. Now you know how to do it LESS WRONG! ;P

A BONUS POINT! - Redundant besagues

Have you seen stuff like this before? I'm sure you have.

Those funny looking discs around the shoulders, or the armpits. Preferably painted on amazon warriors clad in mail bikini.

How? How do those make ANY sense at all? These things are called "besagues" and they're meant to protect the wearer from blows or blades slipping between the pauldrons and the cuirass - into the armpits where dem arteries are.

I only wish the artists hadn't forgotten to pain the cuirass and the pauldrons on in most cases.

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As always, if you have anything to say - SAY IT in the comments! :) I want to hear it.

Candy From a Stranger

Here are the last two black and white illustrations I did for Picks and Hoes. The more I've done of these, the more I started to enjoy myself. 

And here's a cover for a book soon coming out by Moon Design - a wonderful tome about the city of Pavis.
It's been done for quite some time now. It's not at all how I meant to do it, still I'm quite content with it.

This image was a challenge - a first real piece in colour (and a cover at that) I did after a long time of doing greyscale quarter-pagers.
I had a 3D model of the city, which was of huge help to me. Thank you, awesome Glorantha fans, who make 3D models like that. ;)
It was much easier to pick an interesting point of view while keeping the architecture and layout completely accurate this way.

As soon as we started talking about it with Jeff, I knew I wanted to have the sun play a major role - the first sketches were done in normal yellow midday sunlight, but a scene of worship atop a zikkurat just begged to be happening at sunset/sunrise.

And dragon worship used to be a big thing in Pavis, apparently, so I put in dragon banners waving in the wind, hints of dragon shapes in the smoke of the scensor and the scensor itself is shaped like a dragon too.

Then it was just getting the lighting and mood right, painting all those people in the square and keeping the perspective right on the priests.

Some random guy at Dragonmeet last year told me it had "good lighting", so I see it as a success. ;P

I'm drawing again!

Hey, long time no post!

I've been stretching my drawing muscles lately. I seem to have forgotten a lot, it's always a struggle at first. When I get into it though, it's a lot of fun.

Here are 4 illustration I've done for the "Picks and Hoes" book - it's quite rare to see interior illustrations in fantasy books these days:

(there will be two more in the book, still working on those. All "ink pen" over "pencil" in ArtRage)

And this is a drawing I did for a LARP group reenacting the men of Dale from J.R.R.Tolkien's Middle Earth, for a poster I think. It felt like I was drawing this for myself though - very relaxing, no stress over reference, I just drew what I knew well and enjoyed the process very much.

("pencil" in ArtRage)

  

I'm quite pleased with the result. It weren't necessarily the Osprey illustrations I was thinking about while drawing it, Victor Ambrus fans will no doubt see my attempts to be as loose and effortless as he was in all his wonderful elf drawings.

Focusing on the armies of the north of ME was also interesting. I've done many drawings and paintings of the Gondorians, the Haradrim also - all southern nations. But the elves of Mirkwood, men of Dale, Beornings, the Woodsmen, those were all neglected for some reason. They don't appear in LOTR that much and somehow don't seem to fit - the inspiration, their source and origin is more obscure, yet rooted in history and mythology even more than that of the southern people.

Quite possibly it was a combination of purchasing The One Ring role playing game by Cubicle 7 (illustrated by Jon Hodgson, Tomasz Jedruszek and John Howe), reading The Hobbit again in English and also reading "Road to Middle Earth" by Tom Shippey, that made me want to illustrate these less explored parts of Tolkien's world. Less eplored in the past that is, and in the better known media. I'm sure the MERP games have done all kinds of books on the North, but it seems to me that TOR is the one game that deals with it properly at last.

The North isn't quite as boring as I once thought it was. Hopefully I'll get to draw or paint some more of these mysterious lands.  

Totemic Creatures

"Totems of the Dead" GameMaster's Guide seems to be released, so I'm posting these pieces I did for it.
Had a lot of fun doing creatures instead of warriors for a change.

Victorian Fantasy

No wannabe-witty title today, just art.
Did some race portraits for the Victoriana RPG by Cubicle 7:


The Giant one was my favourite to paint. Much fun was had with this character.

The Karakon are some kind of Central Asian gnome people.

The Oni are a race of Japanese ogres.

An orc lady, what a great concept to paint!

The steppe goblins are some kind of russian magicians, machine craftsmen and overall weird types.

Pract Ical vs. S'Wag

Long time no post!

This one will be a (not so) short meditation on the practicalness of ancient and medieval armour.
(there's art at the end too)

Some time ago this Tumblr post was put together as a reaction to the "Women in Reasonable Armour" thing. I don't understand Tumblr, so I have no idea who actually wrote it, sorry.

http://unatheblade.tumblr.com/post/9549555644/just-for-the-sake-of-interest-heres-a

As the author states, this "counter-point" was meant to show that:


"... practicality isn’t the end-all and be-all of military costume. In some cases though, you have to wonder if it was given any thought at all."

Do the sample images support this wild hypothesis? Leeeeeeet's FIND OUT! Raise the gates!

1.) First image are the La Tene Gallic warriors masterfully illustrated by Angus McBride. What is the weird impractical element here?

• The eagle helmet?   - as much as I respect McBride, he made the helmet look much heavier than the original piece suggests. We have no idea if it was a real helmet meant for battle, or if it was a ceremonial object. If it was used in battle, it probably wasn't as obstructive as we may think.
• The naked guy?   - a more likely complaint. Did celts fight naked? Period sources suggest some of them might have. Why on Earth would anyone do that? There are many theories. It might've been a religious thing, for morale improvement, or it simply felt better for the warriors to fight without clothing constraining their manly bodies. There is a relevant anecdote by a Roman writer (whose name escapes me now) describing how units of naked warriors suffered considerably larger casualties in a missile skirmish than their clothed allies. A simple cloak apparently makes a difference. So why didn't they wear more armour? Mail was incredibly rare and expensive in this period, leather armour would've been much more common. It's not exactly clear how widespread and how commonly used armour was. Organic armour has the unfortunate tendency of disappearing completely without a trace. How common were these naked "barbarians"? We don't know. 

2.) Celtiberians! So what's so wacky about these guys?

• The helmet crests? Helmet crests seem to have been rather popular through human history. The exact purpose we can't be sure of, but it's probably something to do with recognizing your allies by the colours and shapes of their silhouette. That's very importand on the battlefield. Sure, the impractical reason would be to show off how much of a cock you are. (you know, how birds have these colourful crests)  Were they so obstructive that it became impractical? Maybe. Would they have been used if they were that impractical? No. Ancient people weren't stupid.
• The lack of metal armour? See answer above. Armour was rare, difficult to make. Hence the large shields. This type of attire also allowed for unrestricted mobility and no doubt allowed them to fight easier in warm climate. We also have to keep in mind that these are reconstructions mainly done from vase paintings. It's the artists job to make them look interesting, it's an illustration. A thing odd to our eye and sense of "normality" is not necessarily impractical.

3.)  A Libyan. He DOES look weird, right? RIGHT?

• Does he though? If you go through historical and archaeological sources, armour in general wasn't a big thing in 13th century BC. Just like any other human invention armour underwent an evolutionary process. We can't point fingers at Libyans who lived 3300 years ago and laugh at them for not wearing something more reasonable. Hey Libyans, why don't you just use machine guns?! I'm sure a cloak of thick hide was quite the shit 1300 BC.

4.) and 5.) Spartans.

• Not much to be added here. Crests - check. Half-naked with large shields - check. Metal breastplates and greaves though! Really, no impracticalness here. And they're not wearing pants? So what? Trousers were considered weak and womanly by the Greeks. Take that, feminism!

6.) The Maya. Oh yes, we're definitely getting into the wacky territory.

• I think the correctness of the reconstruction is the most crucial issue here. We're using rock carvings of mythical heroes and gods to reconstruct what real warriors used. Is it a wrong approach? Not necessarily. We can be quite sure that many things in these reconstructions are wrong though.
• I think the Maya and other American cultures' battle gear like them are a product of isolation and lack of metals. A ritual nature of battles probably also played a role. These Mayans aren't all that different to the half naked Libyan archer up there, except for all the jewelry and feather plumes. Were those really used in battle? I don't think we can say either way for sure.

 7.) IIRC this is an Aztec warrior.

• All of the above written about the Maya applies here as well.
• We can't underestimate the effect such gear had on the opponents visually. Similarly to the winged Polish hussars, it may have been quite intimidating for the people at that time. (which is certainly practical)

 8.) Persian soldiers.

• I don't see anything impractical here. Yes, they're colourful, but they're not guerilla warriors who need to hide. They're soldiers of the largest empire of its time, they're displaying the wealth and power of their faction. And they wear pants.

9.) Egyptians

• See the Libyan above, all that applies here as well. 

10.) Thracian peltast.

• I have no idea what the impractical parts of his gear were supposed to be. He's lightly armed and armoured, because he's supposed to be a light infantryman, a mobile skirmisher.

Conclusion:

I'm not a fan of generalizations. Quite obviously, saying that all battle gear was always practical is wrong. I don't think the Tumblr post tried to be controversial, but something about that "In some cases though, you have to wonder if it was given any thought at all." sentence rubbed me the wrong way.

Of course it was given thought. A lot of thought, no doubt. Ancient people weren't stupid. They didn't want to die. They protected themselves as well as they could.

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Not to be all boring and historical, here's a recent cover painting I did! \o/ Details are on my DeviantArt gallery.