Hey there! Random question but I’m curious, how would you go about drawing chainmail? I have a D&D character that has chainmail under their armour and every time I try to draw them I’ll start off by drawing all the links by hand then it gets way too tedious so I go look for chainmail pattern on google and paste it lmao but it feels like I’m cheating by doing that, and it clashes with the style I’m going for. I was wondering if you had any tips or tricks?
I don’t feel particularly great at drawing chain-mail either but there’s a technique I learned from a tutorial a bunch of years ago that I think makes a pretty good texture. It’s fast and the end result is cartoon-y enough to match a less photo-realistic style. I can’t for my life find the tutorial so I’ll recreate it here (using Photoshop):
1. Fill your canvas with black or white. Filter -> Render -> Clouds
2. Filter -> Filter Gallery -> Glass (under the Distort category) Keep smoothness as low as possible, play with the other settings
3. Find a filter in Filter Gallery that you like and apply it. Combine them, if needed.
4. When applying texture to the drawing, use Edit->Transform->Warp to make it fit the shape you’re trying to convey
You can stack more filters on after the texture is placed or draw over it with a textured brush to make it look less uniform if that’s what you want. Add a shine to it with a big soft brush, colorize it, go crazy. I go with whatever looks best to me atm.
This is how I did Geralt’s armor too, though since I knew the final print will be smaller than 1.5″ I didn’t worry about details much.
Astronaut bird 