Return of the Watercolour Sketches

Chinese New Year is around the corner and everyone in the clothing industry, from the haberdashers to the cloth merchants to the tailors at the workshop (as well as every other industry) are going home and calling it a year. I've not much I can do for a little bit, so I'm taking to opportunity to dig though some of the old sketches I haven't found the time to paint and, well, paint them up.

To a certain extent, these aren't just ideas that weren't as good (and thus didn't quite get coloured first time round). Some are just abandoned because I'm not a very organised person, or I was too timid to put paintbrush to page. I was once told that you should always scan, then pain and ink. Then you could always go back and do it again a different colour. The Designer used to work in the glory that is Microsoft Paint and we would recolour drawings in it with the flood tool (the Flembic military dress went through half a dozen colours before we went with blue). We should probably do that again.

The above is of layered Persian outfits I was toying around with for Odyssey. I'm not entirely happy with it; I should have probably been more ambitious with the patterns, but drawing is hard (and I'm also out of practice).

There are a lot of rumours regard Empire and among them what the costumes inspirations would be. I'm still hanging back from actually drawing anything for it, but I do seem to have hit a vein of high medieval dresses in my sketching past, so here it is (to the right and bottom). Perhaps I'll be able to pass it off as some Empire culture or another in a few more months. (Insert smileyface here.)

The other seems to be some of the preliminary sketches for when I was dabbling with ricepunk. Revisiting that sketch and visiting Shanghai has got me thinking again, so I'll probably post about that at some point.

Exquisite Hand-Tooled Vambraces

Frankly, these are utterly exquisite. I do think our leatherworker has outdone herself this time.

The designs are adapted from stock images, ranging quite widely from celtic beasts from the Book of Kells to heraldic beasts. There are some rather obvious attempts at tapping into recognisable motifs of the various live roleplay settings, including a green scarab bracer for Odyssey's Egypt (unlike real world Egypt, Odyssey's Egypt is rather more keen on green than blue.) There's also a very classical-seeming hippocampus (see left) again for Odyssey and various celtic knot-beasts.

There is a plan taking shape to commission some our local artists like Amy Clarke and Christopher Worth to design such armour for limited runs. Though it is (unsurprisingly) somewhat dependent on how well the vambraces do in the coming months.

And so, the tooled vambraces are finally available at £40 a pair on the Character Kit website.

More photos of the vambraces under the cut.

Prototype: Hand-tooled Vambraces

I've finally managed to get my hands on the tooled vambraces prototype (it was trapped in the limbo of the postal service for far too long). After the business with the the tooled notebooks (now available from Character Kit at £13), I had tried to convince them to attempt making simple vambraces with tooled designs. The details aren't quite right, but as a prototype I'm rather pleased.

The design, incidentally, is taken from the pages of the Book of Kells.