How to Paint Realistic Chainmail

Here is the Photoshop ABR Brush file.

A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying podcast

Teaser image

I ran a real-play game of A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying for the ladies of the podcast Close the Door and Come Here. Inspired by this page of the Goblins webcomic, I illustrated the party to get the podcasters excited about the game. Most had never played a tabletop game before, and were unsure of what to expect. The full resolution image is a Patreon exclusive.


You can listen to the adventure here: episode 1 and episode 2.

thumbnail of chainmail brush

While painting the knight I made a chainmail brush in Photoshop to speed things up. It's actually quite simple; it's just the highlight of one ring. When used with enough spacing it stamps down the rings in a row. Work on a dark base for shadows. But be sure to follow normal patterns of chainmail: the chain rows lay horizontally, and flip the brush around so the rows face the opposite direction (so a row of right-facing rings is below the row of left-facing rings).

Initial sketch

I didn't know I was going to take this art to full painting phase. It just started with a morning sketch and I kept going when I heard the response from the group. Eon turned in her character at the last minute, so she was drawn last. You can see the maester originally had a cohort, who was secretly an undead minion, ala Qyburn. But that was dropped as I warned her of the ramifications if such a secret was discovered in-game.

If you're interested in playing the adventure with your own gaming group, here is the pdf homebrew module. It's short and encapsulates the essential themes of Game of Thrones. The adventure is called The Second Whitewalls Rebellion. The notes will be a bit different when you ready them, as I improvised throughout the game and especially at the end.