Designing weapons and armour

From The Battle for Wesnoth Wiki
Revision as of 15:32, 1 August 2007 by Sgt. Groovy (talk | contribs)

by Zookeeper

Often one sees that someone draws these things looking all silly. Slight exaggeration of weaponry and such is of course fine in a fantasy setting, but it's not uncommon at all to go over the board and draw something that couldn't function in reality at all. This mostly applies to portraits and other realistic imagery, not really unit graphics as such.

Now, my point is simply: you can make weapons and armour be flashy and cool while keeping them very realistic, and a real-world reference also helps you to get things functional without having to think what kind of sword handle would work and what wouldn't, for example (and, no offense to artists drawing fantasy stuff, but that usually goes a bit awry), and that there are plenty of references available. So even if you don't feel the need for the weapons you draw to look realistic, having some references still helps to actually make it look good (in the same way as having a reference when drawing a person makes it much easier to get it look right and good).

For this purpose, I thought I'd go through some related sites I know of and post some links here. These are armouries, general information/review sites, etc, which contain good pictures of historical arms and armour. Mostly (if not all) are only european stuff though (which sort of fits with at least the mainline Wesnoth setting), but that's all I had available right now.

Feel free to post your additions (especially to the type of items not covered on these sites), too, since we don't have much here yet.