genicecream:

for learning to draw armor i’d use a similar approach to the one i used for drawing swords!

again, there are two main things i’d suggest focusing on:
-studying the different parts of an armor and how they work
and
-visualizing the armor as 3d shapes

i found some sites that go over things like armor parts and their functions here and here, a lot of nice photo reference here, and a bunch of labelled diagrams on google images

i couldn’t find any clear image reference for how medieval armor is layered but you can see that in this video of a guy getting armor put on

basically though i think its a bit like this:

there is a lot of liberty you can take with the details, shapes, and proportions etc, (also remember, medieval europe isn’t the only era armor comes from!) so you can use that to communicate things like the time period and culture the armor is from, the personality of its wearer, etc.

with simplifying armor into 3d shapes i’d basically just use a regular human body as a base. having a decent grasp of anatomy really helps with this i think

there is technically little or no difference between actual male/female armor, from the way i understand things at least (armor is just armor after all), but you can take a look at this post of mine for strategies you can use to make armor look more masculine or feminine

and then of course there’s that boob plate thing
there are reasons why those don’t really work in real life but you could always pull out the artistic liberty card so