Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Knight of the Holy Sepulchre part VI

The knight's clothing is pretty plain (a lot of white) so I wanted to add a simple design along the border of the cape to add a bit more interest.  From the standpoint of historical accuracy, it's certainly possible that he could have something like this.  I started the design along the bottom a while back but still needed to continue it up the side and a bit on the front.  So I thought I'd take this opportunity to show how I approach something like this.  The first step is to figure out what sort of design you want to do.  I'm continuing what I already had, so no need to worry about that.  With a repetitive design you want it to look as even and consistent as possible.  This is always tricky when doing it by hand (without a template of some sort).  To help I placed a mark where each wave gets closest to the edge using a rule to keep the mark spacing consistent.

Next I start to fill in the lines.  Break down the pattern to simpler parts.  In this case I began with the portion crossing over the other line.  Note that if the line cross through the right dot, it will be slightly offset from the left dot.

Next I put in the other side of the line, following the original one and trying to keep the distance between lines consistent.

Now it was a simple matter of connecting the lines going under to fill in the rest of the pattern.  Where necessary I adjusted the original marks so that they looked like they meet.  It's a bit rough here and that's okay.

So with the design sketched on, now it was time to go in and clean it up.  Taking the background color I carefully went along the sides of the design lines.  You don't need to go everywhere, just where the lines are too thick or not smooth enough.  I also did some glazes of the cape colors to blend it all together and add a bit more shading/highlighting.

And here's the whole scene

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