Spade shaped spaulder pattern

[bigfredb]

This probably isn't too difficult, but does anyone have a pattern for spade shaped spaulders?

[Steve S.]

Like this?

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yRSx5tAHTR4/T ... Armour.png

Just print out the spaulder part and size it till you get a size you like.

Steve

[Konstantin the Red]

Frankly, Fred, I've never thought anyone needed to solicit one. It's the old drill of "look for one in pictures -- and Armour From the Battle of Wisby -- and try and imitate it cutting up tagboard" in such a single piece. Now inquiring into historically accurate details someone's found, which may be subtle, there's a different story.

[bigfredb]

Frankly, Fred, I've never thought anyone needed to solicit one. It's the old drill of "look for one in pictures -- and Armour From the Battle of Wisby -- and try and imitate it cutting up tagboard" in such a single piece. Now inquiring into historically accurate details someone's found, which may be subtle, there's a different story.

Yeah, for most folks, that might be true, but even the most rudementary stick figures present a significant artistic challenge for me.

Never thought about the folder pattern method . . .

[Konstantin the Red]

Well, ack!! Always think about that tagboard & cereal box cardboard thing!! You don't even have to draw, necessarily. You can just use the kindergarten scissors.

Particularly cheap file folders. They come with a great centerline already. For most armor bits that's also the only straight line wanted, so "can't draw a straight line" is actually a plus.

This stuff may not be precisely easy, but it ain't that hard either, nohow.

A lot of kids get a persistent problem, when somebody or some event told them "they can't draw." Like many such things, it's bulls(c)hi(s)t. A damned crock.

I personally can teach you personally how to draw a heraldic rampant lion by words alone; I've done that on the forum before. I can hunt up the text... You draw a stick lion. Then you hang ovals on him several places and circles on several places more, like his skull. On which you jam a blunt wedge thing for his snarly gnarly muzzle and pile big hair on him like meringue. And so forth. Until you find, well, damn that does look kinda like a lion! (Sure, it'd go faster if I was standing next to you, saying "Do this with your crayon," while doing this with my crayon, but we can still come close.) So also with a squirrel, a hippopotamus, a beaver, or a rhinoceros. Tyrannosaurids are fun, but ain't period by about 65 million years. Period guys would think they are dragons with haircuts.

[Konstantin the Red]

From '02:

If they want a critter on their shield, I help them with methods for drawing good critters: You want a rampant lion and can't draw? Try this, then: first, draw a stick-lion. His head will be an oval with a box sticking out for the muzzle. Hang a big oval for his chest, make sort of mitten-things for his paws. Don't forget he's got a tail coming off the end of his spine, which was the line you drew when you started his body. Now put circles at all the limb joints, knees & elbows. Now draw outlines of limbs from mittens to elbow circles to shoulder circles, with the outlines tangent to the circles. Heraldic lions look better hollow-bellied, so give him a lean waist. The mane and fur tufts don't have to look realistic, but heraldic lions have lots of tufts by way of trim. Outline around skull and muzzle box to draw his head. Outfit him with sharp fangs, glary eyes, and a tongue sticking out some. Often, lions look really snappy if their eyes, tongue, teeth, and claws are all some other color from the rest of the lion (consider a blue lion with red accessories, and you will see what I mean. Literally.) Heraldic beasts are much more emblematic than realistic: A Hapsburg eagle couldn't fly even if it only had one head!

Keep beasts either affronté or in profile, and profile is easier to do.

Last May, one Marius Greyedge (Poster greyedge) wanted two lions combattant with a sword between them, thought it'd be hard to draw. So:

. . . your lions that are fighting over who gets the sword, okay, trying to draw lions scares you some. That happens. Here's how you get away from the problem, as I outlined above. It's multistep and you work up from the most general of generalities -- "it'll go here" to something that actually looks like lion parts. Ready? Take up a pencil. Do this sort of thing on scratch paper about ten-sixteen times. Guarantee it'll get better and better every time. Draw big, using the whole paper -- that's less critical if one line is a sixteenth of an inch out of place. The whole paper is your whole shield, 'kay? Hell, tape four sheets of notebook paper together and have real size. Which also does a nice job of dividing your shield into quarters, which can be handy. "The lion's butt goes down there." But I'm ahead of myself in my enthusiasm.

First thing is you draw a stick lion. Think of the body stick as his backbone. It isn't and shouldn't be a straight line; "can't draw a straight line" is totally a good thing here. Shallow S curves for each lion's backbone, an S and a backwards S, left and right halves of the shield. So far so good? Save the tails for a bit later.

His pelvis is at one end of his spine line, his head the other. Both are just oval shapes for now. On each head-oval put a blunt box where the nose/mouth/muzzle will go. Rampant, combattant lions will be snarling at each other. Think Rrarr! drawing these parts.

Heraldic drawing is not nature-photo naturalistic; it is emblematic. You're not drawing true, nor even Lion King animated, depictions of lions. You are drawing very easily read symbols for pissed-off lions in a posture lions seldom assume in real life -- how many lions have you seen dancing around on one back foot? -- but which look great all over a shield.

. . .

Now for limbs. Lions got limbs at each corner. The back legs connect to the pelvis ovals directly. It's handy to draw little block shapes for the paws where rampant positions them -- good to put the down hindpaw right where Mister Lion can balance upon it, and the other paw up like he's kicking a soccer ball. Now draw stick legs, hindlegs, connecting pelves to paws. Stop erasing and redoing when you're satisfied it looks pretty much like hind legs and has joints where they are. Looking at a heraldry book and sketching stick lions in the air above the lions page can clue you nicely. So can picking up a mailorder copy of Jack Hamm's How to Draw Animals. I'm getting most of what I'm writing from remembering that.

Now for the front legs. These are not quite connected to the spine directly up top, so you can draw some intermediate connector lines off their spine lines to figure out the lions' shoulder sockets are going end up... there-ish. Now paws again and stick limbs between paws and shoulders. Your lions' essences are starting to show now aren't they?

Lions got bodies; ribcage forward, soft underbelly between ribs and pelvis, right? Ribcage, sketch in a big round oval shape for his chest there between his forelimbs; there's his ribs, lungs, heart, liver and a couple other bits that aren't much concern. For his soft underbelly, draw a concave, sunk-in line between rib-oval and hip-oval for each lion, so they look trim and wicked -- which fat convex belly lines won't do. Picture clearer now? We haven't even gotten to their skin and fur!

Each limb can have ovals too, for each limb's main muscle groups -- shoulder area, upper foreleg, lower foreleg near the elbow and tapering down to the paw. A lot like where you have muscles in your arms -- so doth the lion. Connect the ovals to the paws, to the shoulders, to the pelves with more slightly curved lines. Gee, that looks a little like a lion's body now doesn't it? Fact is, if you've never done it this way you're likely surprised at just how much. But that's not a bad thing, now, is it?

Okay, drawing lion heads isn't quite so general. But the oval is where his brain lives and where his mane grows out of. His eyes are going to glare out from that oval down about the top of the box you drew for his muzzle, where his snarling open mouth is going to be and his teeth showing. Sometimes all his teeth. Lots of Rarrr. You can put a line from his mouth showing his heraldical tongue too. Draw all those in. Doesn't have to look very real as long as it's got a good helping of fierce and of Rarrr.

Heraldic lions' faces often looked less leonine than like weird people-faces with cat muzzles and people-eyes. 'N' sharp teeth. Heraldic lion postures a lot of the time look drawn from housecats. Think about it. I'm sure you've seen a housecat stop in the middle of a step, three paws down and one forepaw up, held in the air. That's a heraldic animal pose, named "passant," for he will be walking if he isn't right now.

Install mane about the skull oval. Think "big hair." Cartoon lion is just fine here. Really big hair -- with decorative tufts flying too. A heraldry book can help with this... boy, were lions tufty things...

Starting to look like a lion, innit? Maybe a bad lion, but a lion. Keep going; you're getting the idea. Draw more lions!

Heraldic lions got tufted tails, sometimes tufts in places natural lions don't, but install their tails decoratively and raised, so lions look spirited. Tail lowered is actually a blazon item, and described. Otherwise, just raised and arranged in the space available. Yes, some Devices and Arms feature lions with extra tails added... even tied in a knot, which may go far to explain why that lion is all rampant and everything. He just wouldn't think it was dignified, to have some monkey sneak up and tie his tails in a square knot. But your lions aren't this odd; just make 'em more or less an integral-sign shape and tuft the ends at least, perhaps the middles too in the heraldic-art manner.

Claws in the paws of course. All they have to look like is pointy. Your lions may enjoy a specific eye color, or they may not. I always liked eyes matching tongues, which usually means blazing red for both, whatever other color the lion was. Looks very snappy on a lion colored blue, for instance.

Heraldic lions got dog dicks. I'm not kidding. Right there in their bellies, arranged not per cat anatomy but per he-dog anatomy. Some blazon even mentions the color of such pizzles, which may be peeking some from the sheath. It's there for the macho. Its absence may get blazoned too, as how the lion has been... fixed. Emasculate, that is. Your mileage... well.

With all these stick-bones, ovals, and added-on muscles layering your lion, now you're down to the fur and decorative tufts, say at elbows and knees, belly-tuft where ribs/breastbone and stomach meet, and so on, to taste. With their furry outlines in place, you are ready to color your combattant lions.

About like that, anyway.