How to Draw a Knight's Shield

Video Transcript

"Okay in this clip we're going to be drawing the shield. And eventually, just to give you an advanced preview though, this knight, we'll eventually, we'll have him kneeling down sort of like on the edge of a battle field. Like scoping out the situation right before he runs in and risks his life to save his king and country. So in this clip what we're going to do is this shield is going to be big. It's going to protect the entire side of his body. So we're going to start here and we'll come in here and we'll start to draw just a rough outline for it first. Along the top. Again try and make sure you mirror everything you do. And as we get the rough shape of the shield we'll just continue on down. I'm leaving a little bit of a definition along the edges just like that because I know kind of generally what look I'm going to be going for ultimately. So one point that you're going to want to try and do if possible is make sure the shield touches the ground roughly around the same point that the sword does if you can see that there. Because you want the ground to be the same. Alright so now what we'll do is we'll start to add some detail to the shield here. We're going to come up here and we'll give it a little bit of shape. We'll come in here. The thing is is you can really take a lot of the design initiative with these things. You don't have to do exactly what I'm doing obviously. Even back then every knight had a different sort of design for his shield. And I'm just kind of like off the top of my head just coming up with something that I think looks cool. But man don't feel compelled to use all my ideas. Especially when designing a knight. Because again, back then they had very, very unique looks to them. I think that was a large part of what made them special. They were, each one had their own sort of signature look and style. I guess depending on what king they were fighting for and how maybe high up they were. And there's a lot of thought I guess that went into the design of a shield and a suit of armor. So yeah you can do the same. Just think about kind of how you want the overall design to look. One thing, the only thing I will tell you that you must do is, again, make sure that once you come up with a design that you stick to it. And that you don't deviate. And make sure you always mirror everything as well. That's the other key when doing this. Make sure every little stroke you make it's mirrored on the opposite side. And what we'll do is we're going to add more detail to the shield a little bit later. But for now we've got the rough shape here and that's really what we wanted to do. So feel free to kind of go along the edge and kind of just strengthen all the outer lines just like that. Really clearly define that shield. That shield is supposed to be this guys life line. The thing that keeps him alive in battle. His main defense. His only real defense besides his armor. The shield was completely valuable. So once you've clearly got your shield defined and outlined. You've got roughly the pattern that you're going to want on the shield down we can move on from this clip and we'll finish off his body in the next couple of clips."