Prototype: Padded Armour

Yes, the picture is blurry.

It's really not as exciting as it could be, but the prototype of the padded armour (c.f. D'n'D's light armour) is back from the workshop and it's looking interesting. Unlike with the cloaks, there was not conveniently-situated male specimen to inflict it on, so this mannequin was the I could do for the purposes of modelling at short notice.

It's done in a brown fake suede (it looks a little green in the picture, but I suspect that is just the lighting), lined in a thick black linen. It's padded with two layers of cotton, which sounds thick but isn't really.

Would probably look better with buckles in a darker grey and perhaps more substantial. (It has long been an observation of the designer that fantasy character art loves its buckles. Especially that infamous sorcerer from the Player's Handbook, who seems to wear almost nothing but a rather impractical collection of belts and buckles. But one digresses.)

The prototype does differ somewhat from the diagram. The number of corrections and improvements fill over a page of scrawling in my notebook, but all-in-all, it's not an unattractive piece.

The next step will probably be trying to find rivets and bequeathing the garment those extra armour points, but really, I'm just labouring the joke.

The Elven Robes are back as well (and will probably be shipped off to the distant shores of England by the end of next week), but the photos of those are even more blurry and inadequate. If weather allows and the stars align, perhaps there will be more photographs. I'd say watch this space, but it's really not that exciting.