Greetings, friend!

It’s a good time of year, isn’t it? Halloween’s always been my favorite holiday; now that’s it’s over, I’ve got some absolutely marvelous.. nay, delicious work to get back to work on. As is always the case, it took a lot of functional, workable concept by the light of the moon and stars to really allow me to really hit the highlights and accentuate the crème de la crème of GREEN KNIGHT.

Things don’t just happen, you have to mold them into being, wire them into life, then polish them into something extraordinary. For awhile, it feels like work, but eventually it becomes a dull, throbbing compulsion that fires insights into the brain, even on the verge of sleep.

GREEN KNIGHT called for a lot of armor design, and personally, I’ve always felt that when someone designs armor, you can really get a sense for who, and what, they are.

Some pursuits exhibit more of an artist’s inner nature than others, ya know?

For me, designing armor is certainly fun, and most of my work mine veers toward the outlandish, the brash, and the unexpected. When I set my mind to it, I can craft menacing designs with pure white, and I can carve glittering, multi-colored wonders from slabs of dull grey and armor of chipped, tar-red.

The gallery below is some of the work from the past couple years, ripped messily from final pieces cropped without regard to context or composition. Some of favorite tidbits, ya might say:

I’m a jolly, cavalier soul, and I love unwanted, ill-regarded colors.

Give me gutter hues, rejects, cold leftovers, pale ghost greens, sepia, trashy shades of umber, the mottled, the speckled, the worn, and the faded… and still, I’ll make it work.

See, I don’t want Hero Blue, Imperial Gold, or Noble Silver. But I’ll gladly take fizzling, force-field blue, rose-gold and tarnished silver. Those are crackers I’ll crunch, and shades I’ll… um, utilize!

But… black? Just straight black?

For me, not, uh… not so much. Definitely not my forte.

That’s an aesthetic that’s a stretch for me. Gloss black, thorns, barbs, malice, cruelty… I struggle with it.

Know what I mean? Well, think of the Sardaukar of the Dune series, the Dark Elder of Warhammer 40k, or even the Black Knights of Dark Souls. All designs composed almost entirely of shades of black, and they just…

See, I can hardly describe it; it’s that far out of my scope.

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Still, I’m never one to back off from a challenge, and clearly this is an aesthetic I need to turn my eye towards.

Today’s work, the mechanical gauntlets seen far above, are a couple of test renders super-imposed on top of each other, produced from a new shader I created. My favorite part is the reflective sheen it’s got going on. I still plan to do some weathering work in Zbrush on the model, but that’ll come soon enough.

UPDATE:

Quick render of some of the latest progress

Pretty snazzy! RIGHT? 😀