A quick post from Grace! Painting Chainmail (Patreon)

Grace is one of our senior artists responsible for a not-inconsiderable amount of the Dope Art people associate with MCDM. She was kind enough to write this up and we thought it would be fun to share with y'all. 

Grace enjoys drawing a lot of armored fantasy heroes, and that often means drawing LOTS of chainmail, which can be a PITA. Here's how she does it. Obviously this may only be of actual use to someone getting started with digital art, but we think it's just fun to hear from Grace! :D

How to paint chainmail

Just thought I’d share a technique I like to use for painting chainmail and some ways to simplify the material. 

In general chainmail consists of a repeating pattern of a row rings going in one direction and a row rings going in the opposite direction.

When painting chainmail I like to treat the material like a very heavy metallic piece of cloth.  First I draw the overall shape of the chainmail.  Then I draw in the lines for each row of rings.  Next I fill each line with the rings themselves (it is easiest to do this with a repeating crescent shaped brush)

Now that the lines are finished I add a layer under the lines and paint in the mid tones and shadows.  Then I go back to my lines to add in the shadows that are in the middle of each ring.  Finally I make a new layer on top of everything and paint in the highlights for each ring.  The small repeating highlights are the most important part since they mimic the pattern of chainmail. 

This is how I organize my layers.

Here are a few less tedious ways to simplify chainmail if you don’t need as much detail.

Sometimes I like using a quick chevron pattern made of small dashes to mimic the rows of rings going in opposite directions.

The simplest way I’ve found to do chainmail texture is to just have rows of repeated straight or slanted brush strokes.  Ultimately it's mostly the small highlights that are doing the heavy lifting so you don’t actually have to draw out each ring unless you are feeling particularly inclined to kill your wrist.

Here are some examples of very detailed chainmail.  My wrist hurt a lot after doing these.

Here are some examples of less detailed chainmail.  My wrist did not hurt after doing these.

Hope this was helpful :)

Yay! Thanks Grace!