DD1101 - Assignment 8 Weapon and Armour Design

Assignment 8 - Weapon and Armour Design

For this assignment I have been tasked with designing a set of weapons and a set of armour for a character of my own choice; I have to create four weapons for the character, one heavy weapon, one standard weapon, one light weapon and finally a concealed weapon and also I have to design a set of armour for the character in question. As I have been given freedom to design whatever armour and weapons I want for this assignment I am looking forward to seeing what I can come up with for it.

     As I already had an idea of the character that I wanted to design for, this made the weapon designing and armour ideas far easier, although choosing what weapons to use has been a slight nuisance, as there is a wide variety of weapons that I could choose from; although due to the particular character I wanted to choose weapons that suited his profession and look rather than just what I thought was a good idea at the time.

     I started learning more about referencing in the next lesson, which will allow me increase the speed at which I draw anything, and also use referencing in a way that allows me to create a good pose/etc. For characters, creatures, weapons. I also started colouring a couple of the weapons that I have designed for my character, these weapons are; a broadsword and a shotgun, although the shotgun I might change to be from a earlier time period as it will allow me to add more detail because it would be a bit more worn than a modern shotgun would be. I am happy so far with the broadsword as there isn't anything particularly wrong with the design or the colour.

     These are the designs that I have created for the weapons; the broadsword has stayed for the most part the same as only its hilt and guards design was changed dramatically, the shotgun had the biggest design change as I originally had designed a modern semi-automatic shotgun, but I had an idea suggested to me of making it an older style shotgun as it shows more progression through time if I did that, and I am very happy with the result due to I was able to add details into the shotgun that I wouldn't have been able to if I had done a modern one.
     The two weapons that weren't mentioned before are weapons that I recently have decided on; as I am still following the idea of a different weapon from different time periods and from different places, I decided on an American Indian Tomahawk as the light weapon and then finally a Shaving Knife which will undoubtedly be the concealed weapon. The tomahawk didn't have too much of a difficult design to deal with, but I still looked up a few pictures on Google to be able to see actual designs and shapes of tomahawks, although I did try to add a design onto the leather sheath that covers the handle, I couldn't get a design I was happy with so I left it plain. The shaving knife didn't take too much work other than looking at basic designs that were emblazoned onto the handle and blade.
     Overall I am very happy with the designs of these weapons, they have sufficient realism to them which I was hoping to achieve, but then also they have a sense of not being completely real due to some extras that I have added because of who the character will be.

     This is the final design for my character, I am very happy with how both the armour/clothing has turned out as well as the weapons. I decided to put them all together to add to the picture as it shows some amount of realism of how he would actually carry all of his weapons. I think that the shading was defiantly something that I will need to improve on as I think it lets this picture down somewhat; also the I never usually do backgrounds in my pictures so it doesn't really match up with the quality of the character but doing backgrounds is something that I am aiming to get better at as time goes on.